Network accounts are not available, but they are.....

We see this all the time, are you binding your macs natively or through some third party software?

I too have been seeing this for years! I just tell our Desktop Support folks its lying.

I use native binding.

We just recently upgraded our systems across the board to Sierra and see this much more than ever before. We use native binding.

I think this is just letting you know that its getting an IP address, so will flag up and say that "Network Accounts are not available" once it gets its IP address and authenticates with its computer object on the Domain it disappears, Quite quickly, unless you are attaching to a corporate wifi, which takes a little longer.

We use native binding and manage kerberos tickets through NOMAD WIRED and Corporate wifi using 802.1x

The most annoying part of this is that it will pop-up as you're typing and do a "select all" of the username field. So a lot of times I'll be 2/3rds of the way through typing the username and it overwrites it with the last bit because of the pop-up. We bind through the Directory Bindings option in a Jamf Policy and are on 802.1x ports wired/wirelessly.

This is normal if you're binding the Mac to AD. It usually goes away after a few seconds when the machine has established a connection to the AD server. That's when you want your users to log in.

However, as @jhuls said, it seems to take longer with Sierra. We've also seen that if the user logs out, it doesn't re-establish the AD server connection, and the red dot stays. You have to reboot to make it go away.

We're now exploring other ways of having our AD users log in without binding the computer, mostly because I'm tired of dealing with "local items" keychain issues when users change their passwords.

I use the join to domain via JAMF as part of a pre-image configuration, we had this same issue on El Capitan only the network accounts actually were unavailble until we took it off the domain and rejoined.

At least with Sierra it's only a little white lie, just wondered if there was a way to stop it but we can live with it.

Cheers

We just converted our lab logins so that they're multi-user student accounts as opposed to single generic user logins and I noticed this morning that at times the message "Network Accounts are not available" came up after simply logging out. These accounts are configured as mobile so they can still login. I suspect I'm going to get support calls about it though.