Right out of the gates in the lab this week we had a significant issue trying to access data on our file server. I bound the Mac to AD using the Directory Utility and logged in as a user. When accessing shares on the AD Controller I was fine, but when hitting the file server I ran into some snags. While the AD controller could be mounted by the system name alone I found that to mount the file server share I had to use the Fully Qualified Domain Name. After mounting the share through the FQDN I was unable to write any data to the share and received an Access Denied error when I tried. This morning after updating to 10.5.3 on the test machine I was able to open the share and have been reading/writing data without any further issues. I still have to use the FQDN to hit the shares, but I have a feeling that may be a configuration issue with the DNS search prefixes not working. I’ll deal with that problem seperately.
What Apple Says About It
In Apples release notes for 10.5.3 they have very little to say about the fix/issue. In fact, they sum it up with a single sentance; “Improves Active Directory binding and login.” If anyone has any further details on what has been fixed in 10.5.3 in relation to this please forward it over!
UPDATE - I was able to fix the FQDN issue by setting the machine to static IP. Apparently the Mac ignores the domain suffix search list if you are DHCP, even if you manually enter one.