The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

If you business depends on your Mac(s), our recommendation is to wait to upgrade to Leopard, at least until 10.5.2, unless you have some compelling, practical reason to upgrade sooner. Here’s a true, and so far fairly common story of a Leopard upgrade scenario, names and organizations are withheld, and permission to share verified.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 12:07 PM

After upgrading to Leopard, I had no trouble accessing my server-based home directory. For reasons not worth going into here, I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled Leopard, and now cannot log in using any server-based account. I’ve set up the LDAP connection in Directory Utility, and verified that everything there matches the setup on another (working) computer, but am still unable to log into the computer using a server-based account. The server is still Tiger, but it can’t be a Tiger-Leopard incompatibility because it worked after my initial Leopard upgrade. It’s not just my account; other server-based accounts don’t work either with this fresh Leopard install — accounts that do work on other (Tiger) computers. I’ve deleted and re-done the LDAP setup, but it still doesn’t work. Suggestions?

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 08:59 PM

[We suggest] Go back to Tiger.

We’re not recommending the upgrade to Leopard for production environments for at least a few months, as we’re confident there will be updates that will resolve the majority of issues.

If you want to experiment, use a non-production system.

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 03:41 PM

But some of us have to live on the bleeding edge, right?

While good advice, this was not a real viable option for me. After originally upgrading my computer to Leopard, Mail.app did some conversion to the mail files the first time I opened it. While mail worked in Leopard, this “conversion” rendered my mail inaccessible from Tiger; I could still see all my mail folders in Tiger’s Mail.app, but they were all empty, and nothing I did got their contents to show. This was strictly a Tiger-client-with-server-home-directory issue: from my home computer (Leopard, but not using a server-based home directory), squirrelmail and iPhone, all my mail was visible and worked correctly. I’m assuming the conversion affected only the cached versions of my mail in my home directory, not the actual files sitting on the IMAP server.

So, unless I wanted to go without Mail.app for “at least a few months,” I needed to get my server-based account login to work in Leopard. Since it had stopped working when I did a fresh Leopard install, but did work after my original Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade, I decided to try that route again: wiped out Leopard, installed Tiger (and updated it to 10.4.10), then upgraded to Leopard — and now my account login works again, as does my Mail.

So my problem is resolved, and I just thought I would pass along the details of this experience to add to what I’m sure is your rapidly growing database of Leopard trivia, in case somebody else finds themselves in the same situation.

—- end —-

Consider the details passed! Thanks for letting us share.

While we’re happy to work with clients to trouble-shoot issues caused by the upgrade to Leopard (that’s what we get paid for), we also get paid to provide quality advice to our clients, advice that saves them time and $$. Most businesses will benefit from the upgrade to Leopard, and there’s no need to be first through the gate, unless Leopard is fixing a problem, or providing a solution, for which you simply cannot wait.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Default. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.