"Other" login option disappears/reappears. Need help preventing this!

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Level 1

4 points

"Other" login option disappears/reappears. Need help preventing this!

I administer a Mac lab with 20 old 10.4.11 Macs. There are a variety of login options available on startup, most for specific grades in our school. One catchall login option is "Other". Once "Other" is selected, students have to enter their network login ID/password. This specific login process lets the 5th graders access their legacy (OS 9) keyboarding program. They save their work to their network folders (OS 10.5.8 server). Normally this works fine, but on several of the IDENTICALLY CONFIGURED Macs, the "Other" initial login option "disappears"/reappears.

This is a significant problem for the keyboarding class, so anyone who can tell me how to fix this problem will be rewarded in Heaven. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on May 21, 2014 3:38 PM

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Answer 1

May 30, 2014 6:45 AM in response to Technician7

This sounds like a potential network problem. Has anything changed on the network recently that you know about? I ask this because in an educational environment you may have no control over the physical network itself and therefore not necessarily know what changes the network administrator may or may not have made.

In no particular order things to check/eliminate are:

1 Talk to the network administrator and present the problem to him/her

2 DNS

3 Network Cables

4 DNS again

5 Network Switches

6 DNS (third time it's made an appearance but it is very important!)

7 The physical network ports on the affected workstations themselves

Check these in turn and hopefully you'll get to the bottom of it.

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Answer 2

Technician7 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 14, 2014 10:50 AM in response to Antonio Rocco

Thanks for the reply. The deal is that I AM the Network Manager..... 🙂 and my Mac background is limited.

There are enough similarities between Active Directory (what I'm used to) and Open Directory that I can function in our computing environment without problems (usually).

This situation is just plain odd due to its sporadic nature, This problem will eventually go away when we replace the 10.4.11 Mac workstations and the really old Classic keyboarding program. Until then, I will check DNS. Thanks.

While I'm here, do you have any idea why I can't map a network drive from our Windows 7 PC laptops to our Mac OS 10.5.8 server? The Mac workstations connect to the server with no problem. We have one subnet so being on different subnets is not an issue.

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Answer 3

Jun 15, 2014 5:53 AM in response to Technician7

". . . why I can't map a network drive from our Windows 7 PC laptops to our Mac OS 10.5.8 Server?"

I think this is probably due to the change Microsoft made to the authentication level for connecting to Windows file servers. Basically Microsoft dropped all support for anything that resembles a WindowsNT Server in Windows7 and newer.

As you know Apple's server offerings from 10.6 downwards to 10.3 (and possibly earlier) only offers a WindowsNT style file server and that's not likely to change unless you're prepared to change the version of OS X server you're running; or roll your own version of Samba on your current mac server or change the authentication level on your Windows7 PCs to something less secure.

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Answer 4

Technician7 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 15, 2014 7:01 AM in response to Antonio Rocco

Thanks, that confirms what I had suspected from researching Microsoft and Apple discussion boards. I wasn't sure because most of the discussions of this topic were from the 2010-2011 time frame. I am currently experimenting with workarounds until we add a Windows 2008 R2 server to our 2 Mac servers (10.5.8 and 10.4.11) the summer of 2015. One building is closing then and we will get that server from them along with a bunch of Windows 7 laptops. Fortunately I can at least function with both platforms.

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