We are experiencing the same issues with new Lion 10.7.1 clients. We have a triangular system with a Windows 2008 AD PDC and an XServe running Server OS 10.6.8. All Leopard and Snow Leopard clients bind fine, with user authentication and home area paths coming from AD and machine preferences from Workgroup Manager. However we have all sorts of problems with Lion clients. After extensive experimentation over the past few days we currently have Lion clients bound to AD on the Windows 2008 server and authenticating with network home directories as desired and dictated from the AD server. The stability of this set up is yet to be tested.
It seems the following steps solved our AD binding issues but this may be only for the quirks of our setup and not a generic solution.
i. Ensure clocks are synced between AD Server, OSX Server and Lion clients.
ii. Ensure the Workgroup in System Preferences/Network/Advanced/WINS is set to your AD domain.
iii. Ensure the IP address of the AD Server appears in the WINS Server box.
iv. Ensure both the DNS server and a FQDN appear in the System Preferences/Network/Advanced/DNS tab.
v. Connect to your AD in Directory Access with the fully qualified domain name, ensuring that 'Use UNC Path from AD to derive Network home location' is checked in the Advanced settings and 'Allow authentication from any domain' is checked in the authentication tab.. I also had to check the 'Prefer this domain server' and add the FQDN of the PDC server itself.
However, despite our Xserve server being listed in Directory Access in the LDAP tab, the augmented records still do not function as expected and the Lion clients do not appear in the Open Directory computers list. As a result there is no management of preferences such as dock apps etc on Lion clients. I shall try the suggestion above as a work around but feel thias is a laborious way to achieve a fairly fundamental requirment for enterprise networks. Any other ideas in creating a fully functioning magic triangle with Lion clients would be welcomed!