Login crashes at loading home directories

I hope someone can point me in the right direction. About 2 weeks ago I replaced our network router with a brand new one. There were no directions for manual install, just a "wizard" to run for setup. BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT I used the closest computer to run the wizard- my Snow Leopard Server. The router wizard did not ask what settings you want for your router, instead it CHANGED THE IP OF MY SERVER! No client was able to login. I finally got into the admin settings for the router, and changed it back to what had been before- server manual address 192.168.0.10 and router 192.168.0.1. It took me a half a day, but I got the server IP changed, and doing DNS correctly, the router does DHCP.
After that little glitch, most clients were ok. I had a handful, OS from 10.4 to 10.7, no rhyme or reason, that could not login. "you are unable to login at this time because an error occurred". Accounts would login fine on a different machine, but no account would login on the handful. I deleted and re-added server in directory utility, deleted prefs, with no luck. Quite a few clients, like more than half, had weird sloooooooow login problems, taking 2 or 3 minutes to fully load home, and occasional spinning beachballs after logging in.
Fast forward: We had a huge power outage- lasted about 2 hours last week. When power came back on, and I started up the server, at first Server Admin showed no services. I restarted, and my server returned to what I thought was normal- but now NO USER can login. I do not know if this is related to my earlier problem, or a new development. Logging in from any client is attempted, from the logs it looks like kerberos authentication succeeds, but home directories fail to load, and user is dumped to the "you are unable to login because of an error" helpful screen.
What I have tried: Checking DNS - sudo changeip -checkhostname returns correctly, ip addresses match and are correct. FQDN for server is correct. I can ping the server both by name and ip from the client. nslookup on client returns correctly. I have checked sharepoint for home directories- appears to be shared correctly. If I login to client computer with a local login, then Go:Connect to Server, and login with a user account- the user's home is loaded as a connected disk- everything is there. I have looked through console log on client, and various logs in server admin, but I don't really know what to look for. I have gone as far as exporting my open directory database, demoting the server to a standalone server, re-promoting to open directory master, and restoring from the database, all of which seemed to go well- I am able to connect to server accounts manually as above, and all my users are back. In Workgroup Manager, accounts show as normal, and home folders are located in the same place they have always been. I don't know what to try next. Users who do not have server accounts (windows machines, and macs with local logins) can connect to the internet and all is fine.
I have searched support postings on several different occasions, but did not find any helpful suggestions.

We ran into this issue too because we forgot to enable the Network Mount for the users. Go to Sharing --> Share Point --> setup the Network Mount as Home Directory Mount.

Similar Messages

Very slow login/logout with Portable Home Directories

I've set up Portable Home Directories for our department so that people can work from different computers if need be (also, I think our network is too slow to use network home directories). However, the login times are excruciating - some users report average 45 minute login times. None of these users are moving huge files or anything, and even if I just log someone out (completing the sync) and then log back in, the login will be very slow.
If I disconnect the computers from the network, obviously it logs in quickly because it can't connect to the server, but I don't want to do that (or disable login/logout sync altogether). I tried removing things from the login/logout sync rules, but often the sync takes time just on 'Finishing' or 'Stopping', so I don't think that it's any particular files that take a lot of time.
On a possibly related note, for some reason our computers all take perhaps 30 seconds to get an IP address when starting up, waking up from sleep, etc. Is there any reason why the computer would need to be doing this repeatedly? Especially on logout, this wouldn't seem relevant, but I've seen that mentioned in other threads.
Thanks in advance for any advice,
Greg

Apple Discussions has a special forum just for Portable Home Directories, you might want to search and/or post your question there:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1249

Login issues with portable home directories

We are using 10.4.8 of the OS X server and version 10.4.7 on the
workstations. Students are unable to login to their PHD. After
entering their username and password, they will get the following
message:
"You are unable to log in to the user account "username" at this time.
Logging in to the accounted failed because an error occurred. The home
folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server. Contact
your system administrator for help."
Knowledge base suggest turning off the fast user switching which I did.
I restarted the machine and received the same message. I have tried
logging in different users on these machines and they are receiving the
same message. I reimaged the machine and that does not appear to help
fix the problem. I can log in to local accounts just fine.
Any ideas?
ibooks, macbooks, imacs, servers Mac OS X (10.4.8) Operating from 10.3.9 - 10.4.8

We ran into this issue too because we forgot to enable the Network Mount for the users. Go to Sharing --> Share Point --> setup the Network Mount as Home Directory Mount.

Mobile Home Directories not syn'g address book on login/out

Mobile Home Directories should be sync'g ~/Library on login and logout .. but its not syn'g anything in !/Library .. so address book changes are not being sync'd.
Any ideas?
/s

If you're managing the Portable Homes (home sync) preferences via Workgroup Manager, you need to adjust the items that are excluded on login/logout. Look in Workgroup Manager > Preferences > (select user, computer, computer group, or group) > Click Mobility. Then look in the Rules section for Login & Logout Sync. By default, ~/Library is excluded from background sync, but not from login/logout sync. (Did you exclude it there?)
Another possibility is that you're excluding ~/Library/Application Support/Sync Services, which contains the Address Book data. That item *is excluded* from login/logout sync by default.
--Gerrit

10.5.6 Login Items Error with Network Home Directories

I'm splitting this post off from a previous discussion which can be found here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1835976&tstart=0
With 10.5.6 our Login Items are not working on client machines that use Network Home Directories. Everything works fine under 10.5.5.
When the 10.5.6 client logs in, login items with a path directed to the Home/Documents folder cannot be found, and the following error appears in Console:
"Unable to resolve startup item: status = -35, theURL == NULL = 1"
I have no problem manually navigating to the Home/Documents folder and opening the login items. Removing and re-adding the login items does not fix the problem. Revert to 10.5.5 and the login items are fine.
Below is a suspicious error that I see repeated multiple times in Console (viewing "All Messages") on the 10.5.6 clients but not on the 10.5.5 clients:
Sender:
loginwindow 34
Message:
FolderManager: Failed looking up user domain root; url='file://localhost/Network/Servers/myserver_name.com/Users/my_username/' path =/Network/Servers/myserver_name.com/Users/my_username/ err=-35 uid=0 euid=10790
I'm sure I could find a work-around by moving the location of my login items or maybe even changing to launchd. However, this error seems to indicate something going on with the 10.5.6 install that might be more serious. I've done some typical troubleshooting: DFA, Repairing Permissions, Clearing Caches, trashing loginwindow and MCX preferences, deleting the /Library/Managed Preferences folder, rechecking DNS on the server (forward and reverse lookup OK).
Any help is appreciated!
Thanks!

just to tell you, same thing here - it's nothing special about your setup. it's not a big issue for us as the kernel panic at logout on 10.5.6 is the real killer (no it's NOT JUST FONTS) so our workround is that we're not rolling it out! (staying 10.5.5).
but on my own test 10.5.6 mac i get exactly the same issue with login items that are in the network home. local apps (font management app, ichat etc in /Applications) OK, but stuff on the mounted home server - nope and a line in the syslog for each item:
Jan 28 09:25:54 hc04800-bssaht loginwindow[32028]: Unable to resolve startup item: status = -36, theURL == NULL = 1

Portable Home Directories and Login Hooks

We recently switched from Network Home Directories to Portable Home Directories. We used to use login hooks to do all kinds of nifty things to a user's home folder at login, but now it's complicated. I can't figure out at what point in the login+sync process the login hook executes.
If the login hook executes before syncing, then I need to modify the network copy of the home folder, i.e. Network/Servers/servername/.../username. If the login hook executes after syncing, then I need to modify the local copy of the home folder, i.e. /Users/username. Unless I'm mistaken, you can't just use the tilde (~) in the script to denote the path the home folder, so you have to list the path explicitly.
My testing seemed to result in inconsistent behavior. Can anyone give me some guidance?
(Keywords: Loginhook Logouthook Login Script Logout Script Mobility Mobile PHD)

Thank you for the advice, Syth, but I'm already aware of the basics of writing and implementing login and logout hooks. I wrote a lot of them when we were using Network Home Directories. The root of my question has to do with Portable Home Directories and login hooks.
This is a computer lab environment where every user has their own account, network home folder, and "Mobility" preferences set in Workgroup Manager. When a user logs into a lab computer, syncing kicks in and they work from a local copy of their home folder which then syncs to the server at login and logout.
So the core question is: Do login and logout hooks execute before or after login/logout home syncing occurs?
For example, if a user with a brand new network account, i.e. who doesn't even have a network home yet, logs into a computer, what's the order of events? I would hope it would be:
1) server creates network home
2) computer creates local home, i.e. syncs
3) login hook executes
But my testing has been inconsistent. Anyone have any experience or insights to share?

Shared home directories between load-balancing sunray servers.

Our current setup is we have 2 sunray servers in the login group and both systems mount a single filesystem rw via an nfs share from our veritas cluster farm. The file system is a SAN LUN mounted to our veritas cluster farm then shared via a NFS veritas cluster service. The problem is once the nfs service fails the cluster rolls the LUN and the NFS service to another server in the farm. this results in a changed source MAC address and the nfs client service goes whacky (forcing a manual re-mount somtimes nfsclient stop-start). anyone know of an alternitive method of sharing user home directories maybe shared access to the lun and cut out the middle man (the nfs service from the cluster) ?
Thanks

Yep, I always get an error "The home directory could not be created because an error occurred". Always had that, even on the original /Users share that worked.
Kind of found a way around, have written a script to run at login that checks to see if Pictures, Movies, etc folders are present, and if it doesn't it just makes a new directory with that name. It's a bit of a bodge, but seems to still work. Would still love to have another proper fix eventually, but for the time being it's solved the immediate problem I had!
Thanks for your advice.

Update from 10.5.6 to 10.5.8 and lost all users and their home directories

My server has been working flawlessly for many months. I did the upgrade to 10.5.6 and everything has been fine. I decided to do the software update to 10.5.8. When it was finished I could not log in as admin or anyone else. I finally got in as root...then it gave me an error in Workgroup Manager. Said I was not logged in and there was an error of -14008.
All my users are gone and so is their home directories....I hate to say it but this is ridiculous...doing a simple update and losing all the users? I expect this from Windows but not my xSERVER.
Does anyone have a fix to correct this? I really hate having to tell all the users tomorrow morning a simple update wiped all their data.
Carl

Hi
I saw your issue and I feel your pain. I did the same upgrade path to 10.6 and found that I had no users!. This is not your typical apple upgrade, the same as all other 10-X from day one. I cheated and used a new drive as I feel that upgrades may cause issues and I also used that as an opportunity to upgrade to a larger hard drive. After booting up on the new system with the upgraded drive I found the same issue to be true. I used the original drive, modified all my users to allow my new admin account to have rights to a user that I called 'move' on the old system. I booted up the old system modified all the users to allow user 'move' then I copied them to the new directory I set up that I called 'move' on the old drive, The next step I set up a new user 'move' on the new system drive and copied all the data from the old system drive 'move' to the new system drive 'move' I created all of my users on the new system drive. I set up all of my user accounts with a simple password 123456 on the new system I copied the users to there new directory. You could restore your backup on spare drive or an external drive with the old OS loaded. Postits on all the users monitors for Monday morning and... grumbling users with all of the data from Friday, get KrispyCreams and leave by the coffee pot [this step i forgot]. The users will talk about how nice it was that you brought doughnuts and not how there login is messed up [ha ha....}
I know that this is not an elegant or a quick solution but it worked for me and my 36 user accounts. If you know Unix script or Python or Apple script the procedures would be faster as you could batch the whole mess.
Hope this helps and good luck.

Firefox 3.6 not compatible with home directories stored on AFP file server

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have discovered, at least in my situation, that Firefox 3.6 does not work with user home directories stored on AFP file servers.
My network consists of PPC 10.411 clients and a Mac OS X 10.62 server. User home directories are stored on the server, the user is logged into a "Golden Triangle" LDAP domain, where the Mac clients bind to a OSX Server and the OSX Server is a member of the Active Directory domain.
Worked perfectly fine on Firefox 3.57, now in 3.6 it will either not launch, will freeze with the beachball or will only show the Firefox window and not the main web browser.
This has happened before with a 3.0x update from a few months ago. I have posted a bug in the Bugzilla database and have outlined the bug on my personal MacPCSMB blog.
http://www.macpcsmb.com
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542306
Thanks
Michael Yockey
IT Administrator
Yockey, Yockey and Schliem PC

There is an update on the FireFox hosted AFP issue that I have uncovered:
When users are rolled back with Firefox 3.57 (by installing FF 3.57 over 43.6) the following issue occurs:
You launch Firefox and you get an error that states "XML scripting is not working; Firefox cannot open the window".
This basically means that the plug-ins for Firefox 3.6 are still in the user's Firefox profile directory. These new plug-ins are not compatible with Firefox 3.57. You will have to manually go into the user's home directory and remove their profile folder and extract a specific file. The issue is that the user will have to be able to have access to their bookmarks. If you delete the profile folder their bookmarks are gone, though that is simpler to do.
It looks like Mozilla significantly changed the profile folder setup in FF 3.6, so a profile rollback or deletion is necessary.
If you DO NOT have a good backup:
To solve this issue do the following. This guide assumes you have the users home directory stored on an AFP server and you have open directory logins:
1. The Firefox profile is located here according to Mozilla: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles . The Mac OS X Directory is located at /~username/library/application support/Firefox.
2. Find and COPY the places.sqlite file. This is the Firefox bookmarks and history database. This file is very important to back up.
3. Now take the user's Firefox profile and TRASH it.
4. Now either have the user launch Firefox with their Open Directory login, or change their password and login yourself. Open Firefox and then after it full loads quit the program. Copy the places.sqlite file back into the Firefox profile folder. You will have to do this manually for every user unless if you make an AppleScript to take care of this.
5. The program will now work again.
The second option is to go into Retrospect or Time Machine (or whatever backup solution you use) and restore the user's profile direct to a point in time before Firefox was updated to 3.6 and then subsequently reverted back to 3.57. How to use backup software is way beyond the scope of this blog posting.
Thanks
Mike Yockey
www.MacPCSMB.com

LDAP Users & Home Directories

Hello, any help would be much appreciated on this one!
I have a Dual 2.3Ghz Xserve G5 running OSX Server 10.4.9 with a 700Gb Xserve RAID. All users home directories are stored on the RAID. I had 1361 users on the LDAP Open Directory system and all was running perfectly. I tried to add another 10 users, all added fine into Workgroup Manager, but I was then getting "User already Logged In" messages, when the users were not logged in. If I turn on "multiple logins" the user can login but the home directory is not created!! Is this a limitation of LDAP OD? A problem with the OS and the Finder not handling more than 1361 directories??? Any help would be excellent!!!!!!
Dual 2.3Ghz G5 Xserve & Xserve RAID Mac OS X (10.4.9) Latest updates installed!

Hi
Wow! I wonder what the load on the CPU would be?
I’ve read somewhere that OSX Server as an Open Directory Master can host up to 10,000 users and by implication – you would assume – the same amount of home folders.
What you’ve got ask yourself is whether the network can cope with that amount of users? If you have the budget you should really be looking to balance the load with more than one server, probably 3 at the least. One to run DNS and DHCP Services, another to run Open Directory and another to run simple file services such as AFP, Windows, Print etc. It would be a good idea in the environment you describe to think about a fallover (replica) server also.

Portable Home Directories, FileSyncAgent, and Case-sensitive drives

I have a 10.5.3 Server machine that is serving (via NFS) home directories to a mixed group of Leopard (10.5.3) and Linux clients. The drive containing user home directories is formatted to be case-sensitive. I also use Portable Home Directories and mobile accounts on all the Leopard clients. Many of the client machines have case-insensitive drives.
FileSyncAgent is dying on the client machines with a lot of "Reverification failed" messasges in ~/Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent.log. The files being verified often have mixed case file names, while the error messages show lower case file names.
Anyone else seeing FileSyncAgent dying on every home sync?

Hi Guys, So far I have found what seems to be a fix for this issue. I was also having the issue happen to me around some iphoto file but that seems to be coincidental. I will detail what I did below but please first backup the mobile account on the local machine as you will need to recreate it.
Backup the local mobile home folder
Log into a admin account and delete the mobile account under the Accounts Pane in System Prefs
Log into the users Network account on the notebook
Delete all the following items
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices
~/Library/Mirrors
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.syncservices.*
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.filesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.homesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.syndication.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Syndication
Logout of the Network account and then back in
Recreate the Mobile Account
From this point on I have not seen any issues with the FileSyncAgent crashing. Omit any of the files listed above that do not exist. I generally have the notebooks sync on login and logout and I forced a sync while logged in to make sure everything was okay and so far so good. Hope this helps.

Portable Home Directories on ReadyNAS

I have a MacMini runing OS X 10.6 in an environment with about 15 users. Portable Home Directories are currently setup and working on the server. The server is almost out of space and I would like to move these PHD's to a ReadyNAS and have them sync properly.
I am having a tough time figuring this out. I have created shares on the ReadyNAS and can access the shares without a problem.
Through Server Admin I have tried both AFP and NFS shares. I can successfully create a user's home drive on either type of share.
When I share by NFS I can log in as a user and it tries to begin syncing. It gets stuck on connecting to network drive and then gives me an error that the NFS share is not available.
If I share via AFP I get a message that says the user cannot login due to an error.
I have searched quite a bit and have found that PHD's are not documented very well. Does anyone have experience with PHD's and a ReadyNAS? If so I would appreciate any help.

Hi Guys, So far I have found what seems to be a fix for this issue. I was also having the issue happen to me around some iphoto file but that seems to be coincidental. I will detail what I did below but please first backup the mobile account on the local machine as you will need to recreate it.
Backup the local mobile home folder
Log into a admin account and delete the mobile account under the Accounts Pane in System Prefs
Log into the users Network account on the notebook
Delete all the following items
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices
~/Library/Mirrors
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.syncservices.*
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.filesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.homesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.syndication.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Syndication
Logout of the Network account and then back in
Recreate the Mobile Account
From this point on I have not seen any issues with the FileSyncAgent crashing. Omit any of the files listed above that do not exist. I generally have the notebooks sync on login and logout and I forced a sync while logged in to make sure everything was okay and so far so good. Hope this helps.

Sol 10 TX Home Directories LDAP AUTOFS

I currently have a small network that is comprised of Solaris 10 08/07 machines with Trusted Extensions enable on all machines. The network does have a Trusted Extensions LDAP server that serves the network. The LDAP server is Directory Server 5.2 P4. I have not loaded any patch clusters on any of the systems.
When I create a user I have to perform a lengthy process to ensure the user can log in at multiple levels simultaneously. After the user is created, the process is as follows:
On the LDAP/Home Directory Server (My LDAP Server also serves the Home Directories)
1.     Log into the system as the newly created user
2.     Ensure the session is Trusted JDS.
3.     Ensure �Restrict to Single level� is selected.
4.     Select the Lowest Level Label available to the user. For example if your label encodings file contain the labels FU and BAR, with FU being dominated by BAR you would select FU.
5.     Continue the login process. A single level desktop would be displayed and the user can open terminal windows, etc..
6.     Logout of the system. Do not logout until a desktop is displayed.
7.     Repeat steps 1-6 for all possible labels for the user, selecting 1 at a time.
8.     Once the user has a desktop at all levels, log in to the system.
9.     Make sure �Restrict to Single Label� is NOT checked.
10.     Select the Highest possible label for the user. This will enable the user to select workspaces at all levels.
11.     The desktop is loaded for the highest label available.
12.     In the workspace selector, select each workspace and change the label on the workspace to another security label.
13.     Repeat step 12 until all labels are represented. (The only desktop the will be available is the highest level desktop, the other desktops WILL NOT be loaded)
14.     Log out and log back in again ensuring that the �Restrict to Single Label� is NOT checked and select the highest possible label for the user. At this point all desktops will appear.
15.     Repeat the entire process for every client machine that the user will need access to.
This process only needs to be executed once for each user on each system for all labels. Currently this is a small network, and although time consuming this process is Ok. However, as the network increases and users increase the process will to cumbersome.
I have read in the TX install guide explains this process for the Home Directory server. But I have to do this on the clients as well. Once the process is complete I can log in as the user and verify that autofs is mounting the home directory properly. I have not tried the script that is in the install guide either. I will need to modify the script to ensure only new users are given home dirs.
Has anyone else experienced this behavior or found a fix? Again I am running DS 5.2 P4 and no additional patch clusters.

Are the zones on different machines (1 for LDAP and 1 for the machine the user logs into)?
General:
You may want to check and see if the zones of each machine is listed under the CIPSO rules and not set as admin low ---- tninfo command for this check.
If on the same machine you have 2 options 1) go through the network interface for each zone and use CIPSO rules [regular networking] 2) be subject to the rules of multi-level access, in which you should use multi-level aware process to access the files [keep in mind the dominance issue, and that you should really know what you are doing if you create a multi-level aware process].

Folder Redirection not working on SMB Network Home Directories

I've setup network home directories on a 10.7.3 server. NHDs are available via SMB currently. I'm trying to setup folder redirection via MCXRedirector for both the ~/Library/Cache folder and ~/Downloads and redirect them to the local client. Client is 10.7.3 joined to OD. I'm using Login Redirection and the option to delete the existing folder and create a symlink. I used these instructions to create the redirectors: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=MCXRedirector
When NHDs are available via SMB, the folders are created on the local client, but the symlinks aren't created in the NHD. I can switch the NHDs to be available via AFP, and then it works fine. I can switch back to SMB and the symlink stays in place and appears to work with no issue.
Am I missing something here? I can't find any documentation that says I can't use MCXRedirector with SMB shares, and I see a number of posts where it appears that people are using it successfully... so I'm not sure what is wrong? Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

Hi James,
For folder redirection issues, we can go to Windows Logs\Application in Event Viewer to check if some related error events were logged. Besides, we can also run cmd command
gpresult/v or gpresult/z to collect group policy result to check if something goes wrong.
Regarding how to configure folder redirection, in my opinion, the following article provides a good guide.
Configuring Folder Redirection
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc786749.aspx
Best regards,
Frank Shen

How to configure Airport Extreme AFP disk sharing to host multiple users' home-directories (Lion, using autofs)

I have this working, but only by completely bypassing access control, using guest access with read+write permissions.
Do I need to buy Lion Server, to do this. All my past unix/linux experience says Lion Server should _not_ be necessary.
This seems like a simple & obvious setup objective, but it is proving to be harder than I would imagine.
Setup:
multiple users, sharing two mac mini's running OSX Lion
connected to an Airport Extreme (4th gen) with a USB disk shared (either via disk password, AEBS password, or using AEBS user's passwords).
After much experimentation and web research, I finally have managed to get the mini's to auto mount the Airport Extreme's AFP shared USB disk. Well almost... It only works if, on the Airport, I set the guest access permissions to read+write and select the "Secure Shared Disks" method to "With disk password" or "with Airport Extreme password". In other words, it only works if I essentially bypass/disable access control by using the guest authentication mechanism to the AFP shared disk.
On the Lion side of this, I am automounting the users directories via "autofs". The config files for this are
/etc/auto_master:
# Automounter master map
+auto_master            # Use directory service
/net                    -hosts          -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home                   auto_home       -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers        -fstab
/-                      -static
/-                      auto_afp
/etc/auto_afp:
# Automounter AFP master map
# https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3336384?start=0&tstart=0
/afp/users -fstype=afp afp://;AUTH=No%20User%[email protected]/Users/
Then, after rebooting and verifying read+write access to the /afp/users directories, I change each user's home directory: In System Preferences > System > Users & Groups, I right-click over the users to access the Advanced Options, changing the Home directory field to point at the AFP-mounted /afp/users/Users/* home directories.
I experimented with alternate UAM specifications, as well as both OSX and AESB users & passwords. Using guest access is the only thing that has worked.
Any pointers would be appreciated...

Based on lots more experimentation which confirms the information in a parallel discussion (cf. Automount share as non ROOT or SYSTEM user! https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3221944), I have concluded that the Lion 10.7.2 implementation of AutoFS mechanism is broken. I submitted a bug report via apple.com/feedback.
Work arounds..?
Earlier I wondered if installing Lion OSX Server was necessary. The more I contemplate this, the more I am convinced it _should_not_ be necessary. The client-server architecture is clear: my mac's are the file-server client's and the Airport Extreme is supposed to act as the file server. The only thing instaling Lion Server would do (besides enriching Apple.com) is enable me to configure one of the mac's as the file server. This would require it to be "always on" (thus enriching my electric utility as wel). Okay, an additional benefit would be configuring software RAID disks attached to the Lion server, but Time Machine has worked fine for me in the past, backing up to disks mounted on the Airport Extreme.
One solution is to create a disk partition for each user and instruct each user to connect / authenticate to the Airport Extreme AFP share at login. The multiplicity of partitions is necessary since the first user to mount the AFP share, takes ownership of it, blocking other users from accessing that disk partition. A user can "steal" ownership by reconnecting, but this will leave the other user's applications & open files dangling.
This disfunctional situation really *****. Before instaling Lion, I put a 64 GB SSD (solid state disk) in each of our mac's. I did this expecting to easily configure the /Users/* data on external networked storage. I'm having a dejavu "Bill Gates"-ware moment; problems like this were why I abandoned Windoz.
I will make a few more experiments using the depreciated /etc/fstab mechanism. Maybe that will bypass the broken-ness of AutoFS...? Alternately, I guess I could also try to run Kerberos authentication to bypass whatever is broken in AutoFS, but that would require a running a Kerberos daemon somewhere. Possibly I could configure a Kerberos service to run on both my mac's (without installing Apple's Lion Server)...?
Stay tuned...

Login crashes at loading home directories

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