contacts on client machine suffer from disk I/O errors

I have been working with someone from enterprise support and we have narrowed the issue to network home folders located on a drive other than the primary OS drive. I have confirmed by creating a new user in OD and creating the home folder using the local only option which puts it in "/Users". No problem exists when logged in as this user from a 10.8.1 client.

Apple engineering knows about this problem at least since the end of July.

It is not quite correct that "drives other than the primary OS drive" play a role. A user's home folder can be located on any drive and this will work fine.

The actual cause of this problem is the AFP protocol. Several applications in OS X (including the Contacs database) are using the SQLite database engine with the feature "Write Ahead Logging (WAL)" enabled. It is officially deprecated to use WAL in a network environment. The I/O errors we see here are a direct result of the incompetent (mis-)use of SQLite.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, this will work with the NFS protocol (which is explicitly designed to emulate the behavior of a hard drive file systems more closely), but not with AFP.

I would be surprised if Apple could fix this so quickly. There are even more serious issues with AFP which were known before Lion came out. They did not fix this for more than one year.

Nice work, I've just made a new user in /Users and you are right it seems to fix the issue.

I hope now the issue has been identified it is a relative easy fix, because I don't want to put users home folder on the server boot drive!

what would be the diadvantaged of using NFS instead of AFP ?

Kevin:

I guess you have misunderstood dawag's comment: The problem cannot be fixed by putting the user's home folder on the server's boot disk. He configured the user "local only" which means the home folder was put on the client disk, not on the server.

To your question:

The disadvantage is that ACLs and Spotlight are not fully supported over NFS. Before you swtich from NFS to AFP, you'll also have to convert all Extended Attributes to AppleDouble ("dot underscore") files first. (This can be done via scripting and the command "SplitForks".) An advantage is that NFS is usually faster than AFP.

As per other comments above I think there is slight confusion on the scenarios the problem occurs - so to be clear as I understand it:

David user directory was (initially) on an external SERVER HDD ie not on locally client Mac

My user directory was on server HDD

On both, the issue same issue occurred. Updated to 10.8.1 and I still have the same issue. I reused the existing user accounts although I haven't tried a brand new account yet but assuming it will make no difference.

Note that on accounts stored on local client Macs, then there are no problems. But where accounts are stored on the server on either internal or external HDDs then we have a problem.

Thanks

Rob

sorry yes I got ahead of myself, I thought the earlier poster was saying a home folder local to the server would fix the issue, and I made a new user that was on the boot drive of the server and rushed and logged in on a Lion Client instead of Mountain Lion.

So it seems that Mobile Homes will work ok with Mountain Lion, but as it stands now Network Homes won't unless you switch from using AFP to NFS

mbresink- When I create a user and use local only, then log in as that user from a client machine, the user directory is created at "/Users" on the server's boot drive, not on the client machine. My only other option from that drop down is the share we have designated for mobile directories which is another internal volume in the server. If I create a user and select that volume, the user directory is created there.

So, in my case, the problem is solved by putting the user directory on the server's boot disk. I have not tried moving an existing account, just creating a new user.

dawag: This is unfortunately not the case.

The feature "local only" means that this should be a network-wide account where the user has different home folders on each client. None of these folders is shared. Because the server is also a "local machine" where this user could theoretically log in, the user will additionally have another home folder on the server. But this folder won't be used when the user logs in at a client. Of course this trivially fixes the problem because no AFP sharing is being used. But this is not the configuration we are discussing in this thread.

For more information, please see the documentation at https://help.apple.com/advancedserveradmin/mac/10.8/#apd973935ea-5ca3-43fa-9962- 1ba4d343d730

The physical share point where the server is sharing the home folders does not play any role in relation to the two bugs. This was already clarified in the 7th item of this discussion.

Thanks for that explination, I didn't understand the implications of setting it to "local only" either.

So this option just uses the log in info and creates completely independant user folders on each mac.

Glad you pointed that out because it does give the impression that it solves the problem

I stand corrected. I misunderstood the feature and was too hasty in my conclusion. I will update the support rep with this information.

Thanks for the clarification.

Just to confirm also.

Setup a Brand new account on Server since going 10.8.1 on both Client and server Macs as there was implication that new accounts are ok (where as I have been using accounts that were previously setup under 10.8)

However, same I/O errors.

Again to be clear, this was a new account on server where it is stored locally on the server (Mac Mini Raid 1 2x500GB) HDD not locally on Client Mac HDD

As mentioned in my previous posts, the issue does NOT occur when using Lion (10.7.4) Client Macs and incidently, on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) Client Macs - so clearly the issue is with CLIENT Mountain Lion (10.8.x) Macs ONLY

There doesn't appear to be simple solution for this where I want my user accounts held on my server and accessable via the network - don't wish to you mobile accounts at this time - so that any user can access any Mac on the network and get their personal docs, pictures, music etc. and where the central server is backed-up (both on Raid'ed HDD and on external Fireware HDD via Time capsule). Note that client Macs have too small (but very fast) SDD drives to be able to contain user's iphoto/iTunes libraries

Thanks
Rob

Any more updates or progress on this?

Hi Kevin, iDash and others

I am experiencing the exact same problems. I am running Lion server (on a mini) and have just upgraded two clients (minis) to 10.8.1. I have networked accounts with the homes on a separate disk to the server OS (the second drive in the mini server). Mail is stuffed. Tried all the usual and the unusual with no luck.

I hope Apple deal with this urgently as it is a major impediment.

Steve