LDAP internal directory service

I've got Tiger server set up running OD capably and handily.  It's my internal file server, gateway, dns, etc.  Even use it to host home directories.  Love it, it's smoking hot, blah, blah, blah.  Now I set this server up because I wanted it to provide company-wide address book/directory/rolodex services to replace the ad-hoc system we currently have where everyone maintains their own personal directories.

I assume this should be simple to set up, but I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get it to work, and I have had absolutely no luck.  Can anyone shed some light on the situation?

Additionally, I have had instances where my clients which rely on my servers for authentication, go blind.  They cannot, no matter what I do, see that the server is there.  The server's there, I verify that by pinging, connecting to it via ARD and AFP from the affected and other machines, but I get the head shaking effect at login whenever I try to log into the client machine using an account that's hosted on the server.  I've narrowed this problem down to what I think is the problem: the clients appear to look for the server over bonjour by default, and sometimes (for reasons unknown) the server's bonjour "presence," for want of a more accurate term, vanishes off the network.  It happened a couple weeks ago when I had to restart the server unexpectedly over the weekend.  There were clients still connected to the server, and when the server came back, they could not see it over bonjour even though every other means of connection I attempted worked just fine.  The server was invisible to these clients for hours despite repeated restarts (both server and client), then suddenly the server reappeared and all was well and has been well since.

Anyone else run into either of these problems and have any advice?

Thanks,

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Jerry L. Blackmon II <email@hidden>

Coordinator, Information Technology and Design

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids

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