Today a customer called me and told me about a very strange problem. Sometimes they are unable to log in – after the second or third try it works. Whenever this problem occurs the login window reports the following error message:
You are unable to log in to the user account <username> this time. Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred.
After looking at the logs I found the following messages. (The strange characters are rendered correctly!):
AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Network/Servers/FQND/very/ long/path/to/Network Profiles/Netw�x�V���Iz��y�V� AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Network/Servers/FQND/very/ long/path/to/Network Profiles/Netw��ji�� �G��ji�...
Here are some details about the setup:
- Mac OS X Leopard Server (10.5.8) configured as OpenDirectory master
- network home directories
- DNS properly configured (and tested)
- Kerberos working (and tested)
After hours of investigating and searching around I found an Apple KB entry titled “Mac OS X Server: Avoid spaces and long names in network home directory name and path“. After checking out the path length everything was clear – THIS IS THE PROBLEM! In the evening I modified the folder structure to meet the 89 character limit and everything went back to normal – everybody is able to login at the first time.