Nightly Disconnects - Wired Macs

They also tried telling me our network may not be configured to handle the number of machines (we have like 4 cisco switches (same as on another floor, config'd the same). Is there a way to get to a senior support person or someone who helps with companies and not home users?

The obvious thing to do if you haven't already is move one of the devices to a network location where other machines are known to work. If the problem goes away it's likely the network.
If the problem persists it's almost certainly the Mac itself.

As we swap out machines we're doing that, but because it's random it takes forever to see if it happens. This place isnt' one to have spare mac's laying around unfortunately. Well until I got here, now we're going to have some so i can do some official testing.

They're all on the same network however on that floor, and the pc's don't have any issues. And the network team stated that nothing is different between the floors, routers, etc. The whole anti-mac attitude makes it quite difficult to get them to dig in deep. We are going to do some wireshark testing soon, so perhaps that will shed some light.

At this point though, there are only a couple users reporting it after the power management settings were changed. And one of those machines is being swapped out soon, so we'll see what happens. He was doing the rendering to the network from AE overnight and got disconnected. I tried running caffeinate on his machine as well, same result. But that was prior to the power management settings. it may just be their machines at this point.

I've also tried creating/modifying the nsmb.conf file with MANY options (one by one, and together) to no avail.

Are these machines static IPs or DHCP? Is it possible that the DHCP is releasing after a set period of time which causes them to grab an IP again (most likely still the same IP) Do you deploy anything like Cisco ISE on your network?

@ammonsc They're DHCP, I'll see about setting them to static and see if that helps. I didn't even think to go there. I'll keep this post updated.

Another oddity to add, one of the users, when she adds a folder to her sidebar, she has a TON (not a great process, but it's how she works, we're trying to get her to use aliases instead) she would lose them all once disconnected. Now, she only loses ones she's used. So if she drags Folder A over to the sidebar, uses it for a day or two, then it would just disappear while others stay put and are useable.

So that may not be a disconnection issue, might be something else. She's in dire need of a reimage, but won't let anyone near her machine as she doesn't want to have to customize it. So we've told her to expect oddities but her VP keeps pushing to 'fix it'.

So setting them to static did not help. Had a user last night get disconnected at 7:00CST, and when I look in her opendirectoryd.log file I see this error: ActiveDirectory failed to make a connection to '/ActiveDirectory/<domain>/Global Catalog'

Google isn't much help as it all points to Microsoft/Windows fixes, etc.

I'm going to pull her machine off the domain and put it back on to see if that helps, but not sure what else to do. I also have Centrify's ADCheck utility to see what it gets from her machine (we don't use any third party ad bind apps, etc.).

I did a dsconfigad -show and got the following:

Active Directory Forest = <our domain> Active Directory Domain = <our domain> Computer Account = <valid machine name>$ Advanced Options - User Experience Create mobile account at login = Disabled Require confirmation = Enabled Force home to startup disk = Enabled Mount home as sharepoint = Enabled Use Windows UNC path for home = Enabled Network protocol to be used = smb Default user Shell = /bin/bash Advanced Options - Mappings Mapping UID to attribute = not set Mapping user GID to attribute = not set Mapping group GID to attribute = not set Generate Kerberos authority = Enabled Advanced Options - Administrative Preferred Domain controller = <valid controller> Allowed admin groups = not set Authentication from any domain = Enabled Packet signing = allow Packet encryption = allow Password change interval = 14 Restrict Dynamic DNS updates = not set Namespace mode = domain

I have wireshark available to use on her machine, just not sure if it'll help or not, and it's so random so I could run it for days and then not get anything.

Apple still wants me to do the wifi stuff, even though I've disabled wifi altogether.