I am just frustrated

Question

Upgraded Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server
Mailserver
VPN Server
Opendirectory master
Fileserver AFP and SMB
--> breaking a lot!
1.) Unable to set up a Opendirectory replica
Installed Lion Server from scratch on another system. Any effort to make it a replicating od server to the first one fails and falls back to "connected to network directory"
I am completely lost, walking through server.app, server_admin, directory utility, work group manager, command line, tons of logs on both systems. I GIVE UP (in SnowLeopard these things were not point and click easy, but at least worked eventually).
2.) Unable to get VPN working
Not changing anything at all, neither my iPad(2), nor my iPhone(4), both running iOS 4.3.3, can't get the VPN up and running. VPND gets something but keeps sending out new ip addresses (probably the client retries a few times, before giving up, while vpnd thinks connection is set up). The log doesn't really help me a lot:
2011-07-31 19:17:27 CEST        Incoming call... Address given to client = 192.168.220.1
Sun Jul 31 19:17:27 2011 : Directory Services Authentication plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:27 2011 : Directory Services Authorization plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:27 2011 : L2TP incoming call in progress from '192.168.200.222'...
Sun Jul 31 19:17:27 2011 : L2TP received SCCRQ
Sun Jul 31 19:17:27 2011 : L2TP sent SCCRP
2011-07-31 19:17:28 CEST        Incoming call... Address given to client = 192.168.220.2
Sun Jul 31 19:17:28 2011 : Directory Services Authentication plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:28 2011 : Directory Services Authorization plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:28 2011 : L2TP incoming call in progress from '192.168.200.222'...
Sun Jul 31 19:17:28 2011 : L2TP received SCCRQ
Sun Jul 31 19:17:28 2011 : L2TP sent SCCRP
2011-07-31 19:17:30 CEST        Incoming call... Address given to client = 192.168.220.3
Sun Jul 31 19:17:30 2011 : Directory Services Authentication plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:30 2011 : Directory Services Authorization plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:30 2011 : L2TP incoming call in progress from '192.168.200.222'...
Sun Jul 31 19:17:30 2011 : L2TP received SCCRQ
Sun Jul 31 19:17:30 2011 : L2TP sent SCCRP
2011-07-31 19:17:34 CEST        Incoming call... Address given to client = 192.168.220.4
Sun Jul 31 19:17:34 2011 : Directory Services Authentication plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:34 2011 : Directory Services Authorization plugin initialized
Sun Jul 31 19:17:34 2011 : L2TP incoming call in progress from '192.168.200.222'...
Sun Jul 31 19:17:34 2011 : L2TP received SCCRQ
Sun Jul 31 19:17:34 2011 : L2TP sent SCCRP
2011-07-31 19:17:47 CEST           --> Client with address = 192.168.220.1 has hungup
2011-07-31 19:17:48 CEST           --> Client with address = 192.168.220.2 has hungup
2011-07-31 19:17:50 CEST           --> Client with address = 192.168.220.3 has hungup
2011-07-31 19:17:54 CEST           --> Client with address = 192.168.220.4 has hungup
3.) Trying to use Profile Manager to push VPN profile to the devices
I haven't used profile manager before but it looked promising. But I couldn't get it working. I managed to enroll my MacBook Pro immediately without any further problems. For my mobile devices I struggled with two problems.
a) My iPad is configured to use german language. This leads to the problem that the link "prefs:...." does not work. The device obviously does not know what to do with it. Since the same operation at least called preferences in my iPhone, I changed the only difference I could think of and setting iPad to English did the trick. After that I managed both devices to call preferences and trust my certificate...
b)... I thought. Because when I wanted to enroll either device I get an error: "The server certificate for https://......... is invalid."
4.) Mailserver
I got most things working.
-Individual mail quotas - I dnon't know where to configure this. Not so important - the previous values where migrated.
+Aliases where initially inactive --> running newaliases did the trick.
+Mailclients from internal network were not able to send mails -- had to insert in main.cf:
smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_helo_hostname reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname
5.) SMB fileserver
Got it working, generally. One strange behaviour is an accounting software on a win7 client. It breaks with a runtime error 56 or so. All files are visible and read and write permissions are set. No idea what got this broken.
After having spent several of my free days trying to work these things out, without success, I am so frustrated I can hardly describe it. It's been one of my worst experiences. Lion is such an enormous step backwards in regard of missing documentation and operability. Administration is massively more complex than before because you have to use more different tools and for many configuration items you don't really get good feedback regarding what they do to your system.
I still hope most of my problems stem from my own stupidity and, once documentation is available, things will clear up. Meanwhile I am considering downgrading to SnowLeopard on my devices, not upgrading other ones and reorient towards my Linux and Android devices.
I am really disappointed to this end.

Answer 1

We are seeing similar issues with SMB sharing. Basic file access, creation, etc., seems to work fine, but some software just borks badly. Our mail processing app refuses to run off of the Mac share. It used to run fine off of our Linux shares.
Sometimes Windows 7 will report that a file is already open by another user. Sometimes what is happening is that you do not have permisison to open the file. It should say "Access denied", but for some reason it thinks the file is already open. I've never seen this on Samba/Linux, only Lion/SMBX.
Other times, I have seen a document saved in Windows 7. When the user attempts to open it again, again it claims that the file is already open by another user. It's like it put a lock on the file between saves. Re-connecting to the share usually fixes this, but it should not be necessary.
I attempted to use Client Services for NFS (available in Wisdows 7 Ultimate) to get arround these issues. That was even worse.