Afternoon Jamf Nation! Been wracking my brain on the following issue for some time, and wanted to find out if anyone has some tips, tricks, or insight into this.
We have a Mac mini server (macOS 10.11) w/ a PROMISE RAID attached setup as our network home folders server. We had been previously been using an AFP connection from our lab iMacs to the server when our users logged in with their AD creds, but last year we switched over to SMB (given AFP's death march). Since then I've been hearing rumblings from our users that they experience all sorts of weird issues, but most prevalent is the following. The SMB connection doesn't disconnect from the server when a user logs out (I can still see the SMB connection in the Server app from the labs IP). The strange thing is if the computer is restarted before the connection is disconnected (manual disconnection from within the Server app) the computer gets black screen and pinwheel, and will sit there for DAYS. Only way to get around this is to power down the computer via the power button.
We do have some folder redirection to local folders for applications that REALLY REALLY don't like network home folders (looking at you iMovie & Logic), but we see these symptoms even on computers that don't have the folder redirection scripts setup on them, so I am tempted to rule out those as being the culprit. Is it really that the SMB protocol just sucks that bad on macOS?
Also open to some ideas about not using Network Home Folders if someone has an alternative that allows users to access their data on any of our lab computers they log into.
Thanks for any help you can provide!
