Standard AFP authentication in Mountain Lion Server taking long time to mount sharepoints

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Level 1

15 points

Standard AFP authentication in Mountain Lion Server taking long time to mount sharepoints

Aloha,

I am the Mac Lab Administrator for Brigham Young University - Hawaii and our Snow Leopard Server was spazzing out so I clean installed Mountain Lion onto the machine (Mac Pro), installed Server.app and setup file sharing. We mainly use the server for file sharing purposes. Anyway, I remember in the Snow Leopard server when I set the AFP access authentication method to "Standard" rather than "Any Method", mounting the shared folder(s) on the client computers was extremely fast. However when I change the AFP access authentication method on Mountain Lion Server to "Standard" via command-line (GUI settings are no longer available), the mounting process still takes 30 seconds to complete on clients. Does anyone know how to fix this? I'd appreciate all the help I can get.

the command I used to change afp settings in ML Server via terminal:

serveradmin settings afp:authenticationMode = standard

Mahalo!

Posted on Jan 8, 2013 2:09 PM

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Answer 1

bobol

Level 1

10 points

Feb 2, 2013 12:39 PM in response to jamauai

Hi jamauai!

Did you ever resolve this issue? I'm running OS X Lion server on 6 servers that are hosting network home folders for Snow Leopard clients. Lately we started to have issues with students loggin in very slow into their accounts. I've been doing many different changes on both clients and servers like changing afp threads, adding more memory, forcing clients to 1 gigabit connection, switching to different DNS,switching to authentication method to standard, etc. but nothing helps.

Any help will be appreciated

Thanks!

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Answer 2

Pubwiz

Level 1

0 points

Feb 5, 2013 8:02 AM in response to bobol

Mountain Lion Server isdefinately NOT Lion Server. I love Lion, this new Mountain Lion server is a real pain. Very sluggish, afp falls apart on a regular basis, kicking users off the server in the middle of work.

We are running 10.8.2 and the newest Server App update. Don't know what is wrong yet but this is clearly not ready for "prime time".

Any input will be appreciated.

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Answer 3

jamauai Author

Level 1

15 points

Feb 5, 2013 12:53 PM in response to bobol

@bobol

I think the main culprit for all of this is Lion Server's AFP mounting bug. I recently ran a few tests while setting up our students network home folders, and I found that the 10MB (Megabyte) home folder took the exact same amount of time to load as the 10GB (Gigabyte) across our network. Therefore 1) size doesnt matter, and 2) nothing is getting "synced", just the home folder being mounted via AFP. Therefore if we can find a way to speed up the mounting process (or if Apple comes out with an update to fix it), network home folder loading at login should improve dramatically. I called Apple Enterprise Support and the guy I talked to said something about the 255.255.255.0 subnet mask, but we never really got into the topic because he was helping me with a different problem. The Mac App Store came out with another Server app update, you can check it out to see if it helps, however I see no change in this AFP deal... like I said, hopefully they fix it soon. So many things wrong with ML server, I have a list of them.

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Answer 4

May 2, 2013 2:50 PM in response to jamauai

Jamauai,

Have you tried a simplified test case? A helpful question to answer would be: what makes your environment different from environments where there is no mount lag?

If you set up a small test server using local users and share local volumes, is mounting those volumes slow from the same local LAN? How about from across campus? What about when authenticating against an Open Directory master running on the AFP server, or an external directory service running elsewhere? Continue adding complexity to the test environment until it's as close to your production config as you can get, and hopefully you'll pinpoint where it starts getting slow.

Also, test your production environment at various times to see if maybe the slowness is load related. For example, if it's fine at 6 p.m. but terrible at 10 a.m., that suggests the server is overloaded at 10 a.m.

If you are interested in making sure that Apple is aware of your issue(s), please file bugs as needed at http://bugreport.apple.com. Be aware that bugreport is not a support channel, and that any bugs you file will need to contain enough information to be useful in fixing the problem. Apple may write back to you to request more information. More info about how to file good bugs is available here: https://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/bugbestpractices.html

HTH,

-dre

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Answer 5

jamauai Author

Level 1

15 points

May 4, 2013 11:14 AM in response to bobol

FIXED!!! Turns out the problem wasn't ML Server app at all. I used the host command in Terminal and noticed our DNS servers were missing the reverse records for our Server's domain. So when I tried connecting to the server using its IP address rather than domain name, the file shares mount immediately. No waiting. Next step is to have our DNS administrator guy add the reverse record (however that works).

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