Ok, so here's the long and short of an issue that's beginning to creep into our setup.
Last year we were on 10.6.8 server and clients. We had roughly 600 machines in use and all users were networked with Mobile Home Syncing occurring. In the last 2-3 months of school scholar began losing the ability to log into their machines. When I did some digging I found that the home folders were there but the user no longer existed in the Users & Groups section of System Preferences. The outcome was always that the scholar would need another machine and could sign in, everything would sync down from the server and they would keep working. This got us through the end of the school year.
Over the summer I upgraded both servers and all clients to 10.7, blew OpenDirectory away and started fresh. I did an import of freshly created user accounts via Passenger and things have been great. Until now...
Today one of our scholars had the same issue crop up and so with some clarity in mind I did some digging. I started searching with the dscl command and found that the specific user had a uid and gid of -2. Assuming that the negative was involved I went ahead and moved the user's home folder contents and deleted the user with the following command:
dscl . delete /users/username
I've been able to successfully log the scholar in as usual, his data has synced down and all looks to be well. Unfortunately I'm stumped on what the root cause of this issue could be. We now have 770 machines on this network and I really don't this issue to propagate to others. If you have any insight that could assist with this it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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Cole Conrad
Director of Information Technology
Gestalt Community Schools
Building better communities through education.
www.gestaltcs.org
