OS X drops connection to Active Directory upon restart

[timelord726]

One of my clients (a hotel) is ready to replace their three-year-old HP computers, and I have convinced them to adopt iMacs as their replacements. Some people will be running Mac OS X for most tasks with a VMware virtual machine running Windows XP for their very Windows-centric hotel management software, and others (the less computer-savvy ones) will simply be using Boot Camp to run straight Windows XP.

So far, only two iMacs have been put in place (just to test them out before making the switch). One is running Mac OS X and the other is running Windows XP via Boot Camp. I have bound the Mac OS X iMac to our Windows domain using Directory Utility. I was initially quite impressed with how well Mac OS X was able to integrate into a Windows environment. In particular, the ability to mount the user's existing home directory as their Mac OS X home directory was excellent.

However now I'm running into a problem. Every time the computer is restarted, the machine permanently loses its connection to the domain. After the initial binding, the Directory Utility light was green and it told me the computer had connected to the server as expected. However, after restarting, the light turns red and Directory Utility tells me that the server is not responding and no domain users can login. Nothing fixes it except for a rather disruptive and time-consuming unbinding and rebinding to the domain.

Obviously "don't restart the computer" will only work for so long, and already the user has restarted their computer once "out of habit" (which hopefully we will be able to break, lol), but still, I'm looking for a good way to fix this problem permanently. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

 

[TEG]

Sounds like a problem with the Domain Controller, I'd actually restart it and see if that fixes the problem. Otherwise an Apple Script or Automator Script to do the binding after each login.

TEG

 

[timelord726]

Sounds like a problem with the Domain Controller, I'd actually restart it and see if that fixes the problem. Otherwise an Apple Script or Automator Script to do the binding after each login.

Thanks for the response! Since it's a hotel, it's difficult to find a time when the main server can be taken down, even for a few minutes. I will give this a try though.

How would I go about setting up an AppleScript to do the binding? Wouldn't that be potentially insecure, as I would have to include password information for a domain administrator in order to complete both the binding and the unbinding?

 

[timelord726]

Okay, we have restarted the Active Directory server and the issue is ongoing. What can I do now?

 

[tbilski]

I had the same problem. Here is what I did and it is now working properly.
1) I detached (unbound) my Mac from the Active Directory using the Directory Utility.
2) I renamed my Mac.
3) Went to the Active Directory server and and added the new computer name in "Computers."
4) Added my Mac using the new computer name.
5) Attached (Binded) my Mac using the Directory Utility.

It's been working ever since.
Hope this helps.

 

[davidknapp]

Also make sure you can ping the domain

WE had same problem. But our problem is that we could ping the server via the FQDN, but not resolve a ping for the domain. I had to go into the hosts file on the Mac and add an entry for the servers IP address as the FQDN in the
/private/etc/hosts file (use sudo nano /private/etc/hosts in terminal to edit):
192.168.0.1 activedirectorydomainname.local

 

[selaromleo]

Same Issue: Resolution

I had the same problem. I restarted my macbook or Imac and the windows domain stopped responding. So what I did was unbind the connection to domain server and added my windows domain server as the preferred domain server, (since I also have my macs attached to my macmini server for administration). After that I binded again to my windows domain server as I did before and did a restart. Then my windows domain server was responsive again