Mac User can't log in: computer bound to AD

In the ongoing saga of Mac users unable to log into a bound machine, we add this to the list:

A user could log into bound PCs but was unable to log into any bound Mac.  The user would get a shaky login screen with a cryptic message.

The problem was the user's AD account had a home folder set in their AD "profile" tab that pointed to an invalid share.

We have also seen the same problem with SMB shares full-stop.  Removing the home folder path in the AD account allowed the user to log in.

Entourage database and Time Machine

Time Machine and the Entourage database don’t play well together.  The problem most people have is that their Entourage profile is a massive, monolithic database and even opening Entourage causes Time Machine to back up the entire database not just the changes.  Normally the advice is to manually copy the user profile every once and a while and not let Time Machine back it up unless you have an infinite amount of disk space.

You can also have problems because even if all your Office apps are closed the database daemon is still running and this can lead to corrupt database backups.  Before you backup the Office database you can run this command:

tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

And after you are done you can do restart or run this command:

tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to launch

PC slow login- Sites and Services correct but incorrect SRV record

A site that had recently been re-IPed was complaining about slow logins on their PCs- it could take a user up to 15 minutes to log in.

Sites and Services was setup correctly with the proper subnet and DC assigned to the site.

We found that there was an erroneous entry in DNS which was causing the machines to use the wrong DC for authentication.  The entry was found here:

Forward Lookup Zones
[our domain]
DomainDnsZones
_sites
[site name]
_tcp

There were two _ldap entries in this location.  One pointing to the correct DC and one to an incorrect DC.  Removing the incorrect record resolved the issue.

Note:  it is a good idea to check all the Sites entries in DNS to make sure that there are not other erroneous _ldap entries

Computer name not appearing in DHCP lease

We were seeing a problem where some DHCP leases were not showing the computer name.  None of these machines with blank lease names would show up in DNS.

It turned out that each of the machines with blank DHCP lease names were Macs and they had different sharing names than the computer names there were bound to the AD with.

The solution was to make the sharing name the same as the AD computer name.  As soon as this was done and the computer was restarted the machine appeared in DNS and the DHCP lease had the proper name associated with it.