Linux Mint Forums

I'm currently running a server installed with Ubuntu 10.04, 64-bits. This server is set up as a domain controller using SAMBA and OpenLDAP to authenticate users. This is working just fine when logging in from a client installed with Ubuntu 10.04, but fails miserably when trying to log in from a client installed with Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, Mint 13 or Mint 14.

Once LDAP is configured, I can see that it is working by typing this in a terminal: getent passwd and getent group. This info is obviously pulled from LDAP.

However, when I try to log in with an account which exists on the server, but not locally, the users home directory is created, but the user is never logged in. All I get is a black screen that stays black indefinitely.

If I log in with an admin account which also exists locally, I'm logged in after a few seconds, and everything works fine. I can also browse shares mounted through fstab without any problems.

If I try to use autofs to auto mount the users home directory from the server, nothing happens for about one minute, then all I get is a black screen that stays black indefinitely.

All this used to work just fine when both client and server was installed with Ubuntu 10.04, but has stopped working since I started to test newer distros.

Any idea about what could cause these problems? We really need to be able to work with roaming profiles / mapping the users home directory from the main server, as most clients are used by students who "roam" all the time.

I'm thankful for any help!

Problems solved!
It took quite a lot of effort to get the quirks out, but now everything works fine.

Right now I'm too busy to post my solution, but I may do it later if anyone else have experienced similar problems.

Hi knuth,

Glad you got everything sortet in the end. I am searching for a way to achieve what you just have done and hence how i stumbled upon this thread. When you get time, can you please post how you solved this. Also, what desktop environment are you running on your clients?

Thanks,

Right now I'm to busy to post my complete solution. On the server I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, OpenLDAP + SAMBA, and on the clients a mix of Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 14.
While I never had any problems on the Ubuntu 10.04 clients, it was quite a fight to make LDAP authentication work on the Mint 14 clients. In the end it all boils down to configuration, where I had to add stuff to the default PAM configuration to make things work.

As I'm working in a school, and we just started on a new semester I'm drowning in work at the moment. Hopefully I'll find the time to get back to this forum in the near future...

knuth wrote:Right now I'm to busy to post my complete solution. On the server I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, OpenLDAP + SAMBA, and on the clients a mix of Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 14.
While I never had any problems on the Ubuntu 10.04 clients, it was quite a fight to make LDAP authentication work on the Mint 14 clients. In the end it all boils down to configuration, where I had to add stuff to the default PAM configuration to make things work.

As I'm working in a school, and we just started on a new semester I'm drowning in work at the moment. Hopefully I'll find the time to get back to this forum in the near future...

Hi Knuth,

Thanks for your reply and I understand you have been busy. Just to add to my previous enquiry above, the distro i am targeting is Mint 13 MATE edition due to its low memory footprint and tradional desktop. It also seems to run fine on the hardware we have. I already have a working LDAP server using Zentyal 3.0 and wat to get all clients to authenticate against it. I have found a nice HowTO on the Zentyal forums that does the same with an Ubuntu 12:10 client so i hope it will apply to Mint 13 Mate as well. The tutorial is found at: http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topi ... l#msg53537

I have been very busy lately also and hope to do some tests next week.

Best regards,
Minime