Intermittent spinning beachball when using Network home directory

D

Deman

Registered
Hi everybody
We're having an issue here with our Macs that I'd like some help to solve.
I'm coming from a Windows background so there's a bit of a learning curve :)

What's happening is a class can be running and without warning all of them (or seemingly all of them) will get the spinning beach ball and won't be able to do any work for the 2 or so minutes before things return.
This doesn't happen all the time but is regular enough to be an annoyance.

Here's what I currently know
- OS X version is 10.5 and is on the april (? around there) bug fixes
- Users are authenticating with Active Directory
- Users are using Network Home Directories with the files stored on a Server 2003 share
- I'm assured the network connection is fine but this hasn't been ruled out

Any suggestions on what to look for would be much appreciated :)
 
How much RAM?
What exact version of 10.5.x? ( > About this Mac)
How much empty space on the hard drive? (GB, of how many GB)
When the beachball happens, what shows in Console? (/Applications/Utilities) - that will show exactly what's it trying to do.
 
I have a similar problem here at work, which is yet unresolved.

We have a Server 2003 machine that's quite finicky, to say the least. We've found that upon a reboot, you can log into the machine locally without issue. Once someone tries to establish an RDC connection to the server, though, it hangs for around 2 minutes: network activity is lost, Exchange loses connection, etc.

Once that 2 minutes is up and the server "unfreezes," all is well. Subsequent RDC connections go through just fine.

However, if someone then tries to log in locally on the machine, the freeze begins again.

So we've discovered that "switching" from a local to an RDC session triggers the freeze here -- as long as one keeps logging in locally, or logging in via RDC, all is well. It's when an RDC follows a local, or a local follows and RDC that the freezes happen.

Could this be similar to what you're experiencing?
 
Giaguara said:
How much RAM?
What exact version of 10.5.x? ( > About this Mac)
How much empty space on the hard drive? (GB, of how many GB)
When the beachball happens, what shows in Console? (/Applications/Utilities) - that will show exactly what's it trying to do.
Click to expand...

Hi Giaguara, some answers for you
RAM is 2GB
OS X version is 10.5.7
Of the machines I checked free space ranges between 28 and 32GB free (of an 80GB drive)

Will need to work on getting the Console working, the terminal has been hidden away from the student lab images. But I have a mac here which I hope will do the same

Update: I logged on to a few of the machines as local admin and have found something that jumped out at me.
...ginwindow[1898] FolderManager: Failed looking up user domain root; url='file://localhost/Network/Servers/server.abc.local/stuhome$/a/auser' path=/network/Servers/server.abc.local/stuhome$/a/auser/ err=-35 uid=0 euid=799174275
Click to expand...
I can't confirm this happened at the time of the incident though (due to problem being reported afterwards), but a few PCs have encountered the same style error around that time
 
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Your basic setup is fine. Nothing odd for OS, RAM, empty space etc.
What is different to other *X is that Terminal and Console are different. So no need for Terminal, but would be good to have logs from Terminal to see what happens in them. Something should show up on the problem points...
 
Thanks Giagura, one error did occur that caught my attention was the FolderManager one (in my edit above if you didn't see it).
A Google search so far has come up with no translation yet. The folder physically exists though
 
Sounds like all of you need to bookmark the web site www.MacWindows.com (pay close attention at the reader reports on the right side of the page). There has been almost a lot of fixes in the reader reports on site, it is not even funny.
 
Thanks Satcomer I've been looking there, however their "Leopard clients and filesharing issues" link jumps to a 404

I've been looking into our fileserver and seeing that its disk utilization is very high. Does anyone know if OS X home directories requires a certain amount of free space at all times? I wouldn't think so myself unless perhaps you wanted to save a file

Other things I'm looking into are DNS misconfiguration on the client and to see if the switch keeps a history of when it's been restarted
 
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