[K12OSN] LTSP - NFS/CIFS

[Daniel Bramkamp]

Quoting Mark Gumprecht <gumprechtm at msad3.org>:

> One problem I had was with having spanning tree enabled on my managed 
> switches. If you have spanning tree enabled, shut it off on the runs 
> to your server. This will kill the 45 to 60 second reconnect time 
> that the switch uses to determine if there is a loop on that line. 
> The wiring in the building was not installed by any standard. I have 
> legs of the network which will drop for a second or so and come back 
> on line. Run lengths, refrigerators, florencent lights, etc. all add 
> to the issue of noise.  I pulled fiber between the mdf and idfs ( I 
> use those terms very loosly for this network), to cure the 500' + 
> issues, so I only had to turn it off for the copper drop runs.
> HTH
> Mark

Thanks for the suggestion. I think I finally found the problem. Some 
users log in as "User" instead of "user". This seems to work because 
the LDAP uid attribute is case insensitive while the memberUid 
attribute is case sensitive (which is stupid if you ask me). "id User" 
returns different results for group membership than "id user" does when 
executed as root. When I log in as "user" at the console and do "id 
User" the membership is correct. When I log in via GDM the membership 
is wrong again. This is very weird and I am not quite sure why the 
problem only happens ocassionally. I instructed the users to login as 
"user". Furthermore there is a PAM module available which only accepts 
lower case usernames. I will monitor this for a while.

Your suggestion regarding the switches might be the reason for some 
other oddities am experiencing there. I do have managed switches and 
spanning tree is turned on so I am going to turn it off and see if it 
cures that.

Thanks again.
-- 
Daniel Bramkamp