10.4.3 home folder missing. Help!!! (again)

Not too sure if this will help but I know that AFP requires that users have 2 logins. If you look at your active connections with AFP there should be 2 entries.

yeah check. Also turn on Guest access. That might also help.

Server Admin -> AFP service -> Settings -> Access and check enable guest access.

Also check your authentication just above that last check box. set it to standard not Kerberos. Kerberos only works if each computer is bound to the directory master.

hope that helps

I have 10.4.3 servers and 10.4.3 and 10.4.2 clients and they work fine. I would first suggest that you move the clients to 10.4.3. Apple won't even support 10.3.9 for education customers all that well anyway. Second, I would make very sure that you have followed all best practices and not done what some education customers do and slap things together. I know first hand as I too am an education customer that has seen folks try to do it on the fly only to have serious issues. Third, it is TOTALLY FALSE that AFP needs two logins or guest access to run if you set it up correctly. Have 2500 users accessing remote home directories from 600 clients scattered across 5 buildings, and logging in through an LDAP master/replica senario and none, zero, nada have more than one connection to the AFP server at any one given time.

I agree with you when you say this is widespread. I have blown out my server on two occasions to have this work for about a week and then for no apparent reason the home folder stops appearing or I get the message now that the "The home folder was either moved, blah, blah," I read where DNS may have be a factor to this problem. Checked DNS forward and reverse lookup works fine. I read where it may be best to have DNS run on the server, did that as well and it worked for about a week and stopped. updated to 10.4.3 no help. It is indeed a problem that Apple needs to provide a real solution too. Scouring these discussions are great for a while, but it is indeed a great inconvenience when so much time is wasted when trying to solve a problem. I have followed your documentation, I am no newbie to this either, and yet still the problem returns.
Waht gives Apple. ? I have people here saying that we should get PCs.....

I don't see how it can be widespread if there are a large number of folks in the installed base where this is working. I don't mean to sound argumentitive, it's just that if it were a widespread problem, like the 10.4 mass import/delete issue, it would be seen everywhere folks did the same thing. That isn't the case. I agree that problems are frustrating, but have you contated 1-800-sos-appl yet? What did they say? Did you get a case#? Did you purchase premium support? Even Microsoft won't support folks beyond a certain limit without paying for the support.

Anyway back to the widespread, every school district around my immediate area is working fine and are running between 10.3.x and 10.4.x. Most of the schools contracted with Apple Field Engineers to get these systems up and running. We were one of them. So I have to come back to an install, config or network issue. I can lay blame on Apple for many things, but this one is working as advertised in many locations.

Ok this may sound stupid but have you tried deleting the MCX Cache on the client machines?
Have you tried rebooting your servers in the order of login, replica, filesharing1, filesharing 2 etc etc

Also, make sure you are not using any bad characters in your path and use fully qualified domain names......

I appreciate the responses, and my frustration is evident, but is it not strange that a solution works for a week or two and then stops. On more than one occasion. I have tried many of the your suggestions to no avail. Redid the server from scratch as well. I am now about to remove our new Cisco switches out of the picture and isolate these machines, if that bears no fruit then in comes a much revered Apple Engineer. Is it necessary to hire Apple engineers to deploy these solutions. I have deployed countless Apple solutions without such a need. These are indeed out of the box solutions. Maybe the Apple engineers hold the secret.

Thanks again

I've had this problem from time to time and most of the time it happens, i'll try hitting "Go" "Connect to server" typing in the IP of the server that they're connecting to for their home using the name and password of the user with the problem and then selecting either the users folder as a whole, or that users name if it shows up as a sharepoint. Most of the time when i log in as them, i'll find that i just don't have permission to get into their home folder as them.