This one is just a quickie, but I thought I’d post it because I know that I’ve gotten this message before and that there is very little useful information turned up in a relevant Google search.

At my work we use an OS X server to host the home directories of all of our users who log in to our lab computers. We currently only support OS X clients, so we’re only doing this over AFP. Last semester we used a Tiger server and clients, but this summer we are upgrading everything to Leopard.

After setting up a test client computer in Directory Utility (used to be Directory Access in Tiger) to connect to our server I figured we were good to log in with one of migrated user accounts. We don’t do binding or Active Directory or really anything complicated so usually the process is pretty straightforward.

After setting up the client and restarting, I attempted to log on using one of our network users, and was met with this big fat error message:

Not only did not logging in not work, but the entire description of the error read “Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred”. Gee, thanks Apple. Very useful.

This error wasn’t entirely foreign to me. I remembered seeing it occasionally in Tiger, but couldn’t remember if we had ever established a cause, let alone a solution. Just for kicks I tried logging on with the same account on one of our older Tiger clients (that was known to work with the old Tiger server). The message is slightly more verbose, but generally still the same:

I knew that AFP was working because we had some share points up and running. So, AFP and at least some level of authentication were working. After inspecting the server firewall and open directory logs, as well as the client logs, it seemed clear that the user was authenticating properly. It was something that was happening after the actual successful authentication that was causing the error message.

After some research and thought, it occurred to me that it was very likely that there was some sort of configuration gone awry with the actual home directories. Then I realized that I had completely neglected to actually configure the old home directories on our server to be shared at all!

So basically the user was logging in and authenticating successfully. Then when the client asked for the home directory the server was like, what home directory? And the client was like aww shit. I’m gonna log you out right now ’cause I need your home to work. And the server was like, all right, fine. Something like that.

After some simple home directory sharing configurations, everything was running without another episode. Sigh.