10.11 and SMB Network Homes

[tim_rees]

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to find out if anyone else has had any issues like this;

We have about 150 iMacs around the school for student use, and until recently we have used the AD plugin to mount their network drive as their user profile. The network drives are hosted on a 2008 R2 box. On 10.10 this was slow, but worked, and on 10.9 it was great, but on 10.11 folders like Documents and Desktop had their permissions screwed up on a regular basis. The only way to fix it was manually reset the owner, delete the folders, and allow 10.11 to recreate them, but this would last another week or so, and break.

We decided to try and use a folder redirection method to redirect Desktop, Downloads and Documents to the network, but leave the rest on the machine to be wiped on reboot. We also wiped all off the network drives, and started again to remove any left over issues. This worked great.. for 2-3 days.. and now we have the same issue again!

It appears to be a permissions corruption, or issue. Or maybe, a file lock issue, but the folder itself is affected, not just one file, and I didn't think a locked .ds_store file would be capable of destroying the permissions on a folder for OS X, and for the same issue to occur on console access to the 2008 R2 box.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks.
Tim

[mroiger]

Hi Tim,

we have/had a similar issue on a shared network volume with access rights changing in minutes/seconds.
Same observation like you: 10.10 sloooooow but fine and 10.11 absolutely freaky.

Our workaround so far is disabling .DS_Store files on network shares.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

We currently deploy a ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist with FUT and FEU.
I suggest you try.

Regards, Manfred

[SGill]

Are there any strange GUI results on network shares when you disable .DS_Stores?

[mroiger]

View preferences will not be saved for network shares, that was the only observation I made so far.
Anyway it`s better to be able to access folders on the network share in the first place.

[tim_rees]

Thanks @mroiger.

I'm trying to disable them as part of a LaunchAgent on login. (The launch agent does a lot of other things, and then killall Finder). Just waiting to see what happens. I still had a few new ds_store files after deployment, so I'm thinking It might have to be deployed as FEU and FUT as you specified, as OS X probably reads the preference well before my script edits it. Will give this a try early next week if I still have issues.

The other part of my investigations caused me to turn off Access Based Enumeration on the share on 2008 R2.

Thanks again.

[tim_rees]

So, anything I do to try and stop the .DS_Store files doesn't work.

I'm not convinced it is the DS_Store files anyway, as I've had many students with no issues with the DS_Store files all over their network folders. It looks to me like a corruption of the ACL's, maybe when OS X is logging out.... I can't prove it yet though.