@aporlebeke Yes that is correct, we've been running that script now for over a year and I just added the 2 find commands to the script. We have always cleared local mobile accounts on our student machines to prevent build ups.

@Chuey I'm assuming you put in the path to the local disk though and not the external hard drive that you booted from?

@allanp81 Correct, we made sure we deleted them on the local hard drive and not our external drive.

@Chuey Excellent, well it's looking good then. I might see if I can try and streamline it a bit as those 2 commands will also delete the files associated to the admin account, although I'm not sure it matters unless you've changed any sharing settings to do with that user.

@allanp81 I noticed if you do not delete home folders associated to users that it will not re-build those files in private/var/folders. I was able to login and browse mounted shares no problem.

Not sure if that is an issue or what ?

Yes not sure. We're only going to clear those sharepoint files at the same time as deleting the users.

From what we can tell, it looks like an area that handles the user's local 'Public Folders' and sharing rights for these folders specifically.

It seems to reliably resolve this issue, although we've seen many things fix it, only for the issue to come back without reason, so we'll keep testing it for now.

Since you're deleting these files without using $u in your script, you could always put this outside the do loop, since after the first time it runs it'll be redundant :).

@draeconis haha,yes good point. Will update it once we roll it out properly.

How are people getting on with this now? Does it look like it's fixed it for everyone?

It's been a week now since the first machines I did (end of last week), other machine about 4 days (beginning of this week) and have seen no recurrence thus far. It's finals week at the university I'm at, so pretty heavy use at the beginning of the week tapering off towards the end. I'm very optimistic this is working.

After reading the above comments and info our district is seeing the same issue. We have tried the same troubleshooting techniques to resolve, no resolve as of yet.

We currently tried the deleting of the two below directories. After that the machine after many hard shut downs were not able to get the machine to boot at all. find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints -name "" -type f -delete
find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups -name "com.apple.sharepoint" -type f -delete

The only difference I saw before deleting any directories was unchecking the "create mobile account" box in the directory utility. The machine then would boot at 1:20 seconds slower than our typical average time of 44 seconds. After rechecking the box the machine would not boot.

Will post any new information when I can.

This has been a fun one... I have been using the script posted by @allanp81 and for the most part it's working perfectly. I have it set to run ongoing at startup with my management accounts excluded. We use google school, so deleting all accounts isn't a huge deal. I am however intermittently getting calls about "OS X Library needing repair" which I know is resulting from people logging in while the script is still running. Is there anyway I can delay the process of the user logging in until the script has completed? Not a huge deal, this eventually goes away once all accounts get erased. I was just hoping to prevent a few help desk calls.

Thank You

@Jalves how are you running the script? Looks like via a Casper policy.

Try running it via a launch daemon on the machine itself and see what happens. That's how we are doing it, probably means it runs earlier than via a Casper policy.

@Jalves Right now I've implemented a script that just removes the necessary files on logout.

@Chuey One thing to be aware of (which might not be an issue for your environment) is that part of the problem from what I've read is that some students (or adults) are force shutting down the Mac which would bypass the cleanup script at log out.

@Chuey So your getting by with the two lines listed below while retaining the home folder? That may make more sense for us, since us deleting the home folders was only a reaction to this issue.

find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints -name "" -type f -delete
find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups -name "com.apple.sharepoint" -type f -delete

@Jalves Correct. I have a logout script that removes the necessary files every time a user logs out. BUT. . . I did notice if a user already logged in before, files were removed and they log into the same computer again those files are not recreated. I'm not sure what types of issues it may cause or what but I've seen no issues from doing that.

Has anyone opened a case with apple to see what the long term effects are when deleting these files?

How are things looking for everyone now things are back in the swing? We haven't had a complaint now for weeks so all is looking good.

I have not had a complaint in about a week. But it scares me that we are deleting a file that does not come back, nor do we know what the long term effect is.

I don't see there's any effect from it, especially if accounts are being cleaned up automatically.

Just to chime in - When I started in my role in September, I noticed some of our lab Macs being stuck at the loading bar. But because we were in the process of re-imaging them anyway I didn't pay too much attention. We are AD bound with mobile homes. Also, I know an in-place upgrade from OS X 10.10 to OS X 10.11 was attempted on some of them (Casper Admin generated pkg AFAIK) so I put it down to that being a possible factor.

Fast forward to December and a few Macs that were imaged in September in the open access area of our library, start doing this again. We also received reports of slow/poor performance of those library Macs in general. I went the PRAM/SMC reset/Apple Hardware Diagnostic route on them which didn't reveal any problems, then re-imaged. It's also worth noting that we delete cached user homes on these Macs every day.

Thanks to this thread, I'm trying out those 2 find commands in a recurring logout script to see how we get on this semester. Time will tell! We don't use the File Sharing service and removing those ~/Public folder sharepoints is good for us from a security perspective. :)

@neil.martin83 Do let us know how you get on, it seems to have definitely fixed it for us.

I am about to pull the trigger on applying this "fix" on all student machines.

I just wanted to verify that everyone is just running this

find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints -name "*" -type f -delete

We have some state wide testing starting next week and would just like to have a "fix" in place

@Chriskmpruitt We are running the 2 commands:

find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints -name "*" -type f -delete
find /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups -name "com.apple.sharepoint*" -type f -delete

so is the asterisk in the quotes or not?

"" or "*"