I've done the generic stuff such as using fixed IP and not DHCP to access directory service, setting home directories to connect via IP and not DNS, turning off ethernet and modem on the clients and moving airport to the top of the list, and setting airport to connect to a specific network instead of automatic.
I take it that your student accounts are LDAP or Open Directory. In
that case it *could* be that your problem is just a race condition:
loginwindow is appearing before you have network. In Panther you can
fix this by making loginwindow's StartupItem require Network (or
Resolver to be safe, IIRC). You'll need to edit
/System/Library/StartupItems/LoginWindow/StartupParameters.plist
{
Description = "login window";
Provides = ("Multiuser Login Prompt");
Requires = ("Disks", "SecurityServer", "Network");
Uses = ("Core Graphics");
OrderPreference = "Early";
}
That should make SystemStarter (the program responsible for scheduling StartupItems) wait until the machine is connected to your network before launching loginwindow. If that doesn't work, it *could* still be a timing issue: that loginwindow is appearing before you can resolve DNS names, even though you have network. In that case you could try one of two things: replacing "Network" with "Resolver", or going into Directory Access and listing your LDAP server by IP instead of DNS hostname.
(Fixing the problem in Tiger involves rc.local because loginwindow is
started directly by launchd.) I think this has been mentioned on
this list before so there may be more details in the archives.
