When I first got the MacBook Pro, I had a problem. It couldn’t join the Windows Domain. Well, it sort of joined the Windows Domain. It gave me a green bullet, which is I guess the closest a Mac can come to the cheery “Welcome to Kasson.com” that you get when you join a PC to a Domain.
But it wasn’t really part of the Domain, as evidenced by two things: 1) in the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in, the computer did not appear, and 2) I wasn’t automatically logged in to any Active Directory resource.
There was another thing. When I tried to unbind the Mac from AD and start over, this is what I saw:
Love those informative error messages.
I did a bunch of web research, to not much avail. One of the problems is that, over the OS X release history, Active Directory compatibility has been evolving, and it’s hard to know how much of what’s said in a document about OS 10.6 is true for OS 10.8.3, which is what I’m running.
I decided to try Apple support.
I went to the Apple support page on web. I filled out online forms. A tech called in less than five minutes. I described the problem. He didn’t have a clue about Windows networking. He said he’d have to escalate. He put me on hold.
After ten minutes, the tech came back on phone. He said that he’d been advised that it was a permissions issue, and I needed to go to the server and assign the right permissions to the computer. I said that there are two problems with that. The first was that the computer doesn’t appear in Active Directory, which would make changing permissions very difficult. The other problem is that, faling any heroic intervention, permissions go with the userid, not the computer identity.
He said he’d check some more, and he put me on hold. After five minutes, a new tech came on the line, introduced by the old one. He asked a few clarifying questions, and showed no sign that he understood the answers. He got off the line fast, and said he’d email me some documents.
We rang off.
After a minute or so, I got an email with a link to a short article that said that I should use the MMC snap-in Active Directory Users and Computers to fix Active Directory problems. This was passing strange, since, in our conversation, I’d told the tech what I’d seen using the very snap-in that the link wanted me to try. In any event, the problem had all the appearances of being on the workstation, ie, MacBook, end.
After a few minutes, I got a couple more emails, with links to some general Mac networking documents.
I read through them, and found nothing new, except an implication that you could bind a Mac to more than one server. I had tried to bind the Mac to the Domain, not to any server, so I thought I’d try to bind it to a particular server. Since I couldn’t unbind from AD, I tried to add a binding. I noticed that the default client computer name supplied by the Mac was wrong. Could it have been wrong before, and I’d not noticed?
I entered the right client name, and bound it to the network as before. I got a green ball, but, as I had previously determined, that didn’t mean much. I noticed that the binding wasn’t added; it replaced the previous one instead. I checked the details. They were right.
Now for the acid test. I used Remote Desktop to look at the AD Users and Computers snap-in on one of the servers. Initially I was disappointed. Not there. I hit F5 to refresh, and LadyEdith was indeed listed. I tried to connect to some servers. All servers for which I hadn’t established logon credentials on my keychain were dark. It was clear that either I wasn’t really logged in to the Domain, or that my user credentials that worked on every PC on the network wouldn’t work on the Mac.
I’m now wondering how badly I want to fix this problem. It’s not that the Apple support people that I talked to were unhelpful. Instead, they were clueless, and, even worse, they didn’t seem to realize how far out of their depth they were. There was no offer to remotely poke around my computer and see what they could find. The only thing Apple sent me in response to my question was general boilerplate.
I have read that Apple has great support. Is my experience unusual?
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