Serious login issue from Lion Server

Hi all,

I am relatively inexperienced with software involving essentially anything technical, so you will have to pardon my ignorance.

I am currently trying to set-up a wireless network at home using Lion Server, and it would appear I have bitten off more than I can chew. I installed Lion Server on Tuesday, and have been battling with it ever since - attempting to use a 'We Got Served' guide to walk me through.

I installed the Server app on my iMac as I figured the 3 computers on the network would not require very much space, and so there would be little point in buying a whole new machine to run it from. Whilst I was having little luck in making it work as I had hoped - I have now managed to completely lock the iMac. Since it's installation I have had no issue logging in and out of my actual account on OSX, however earlier the computer froze following an Adobe update and I was forced to do a hard restart. However, when I attempted to log back in I now get the following error:

"You are unable to log in to the user account "xxxx" at this time.

Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."

I have tried everything in my limited knowledge to rectify this, and nothing works it would seem. I've read examples of this happening when trying to log into the actual server app, or where the hard drive is corrupt on the machine itself - this seems to be a hybrid of the two.

I can no longer open the computer in Safe Mode, however when I go into Disk Utility all disks when verified appear to be absolutely fine with disc repair making no difference. The only available drive is now listed as a Server drive so I cannot even re-install Lion on there.

This is causing me much distress as I can as far as I can tell not only log into my computer, but can do nothing to repair the issue bar erasing everthing from it. There is a lot of important data on there and I am confident that it is not actually corrupt, however Server seems to have just locked it completely.

Help would be much appreciated!

Is the account you are trying to login with an Open Directory account?

If so it sounds like you have a DNS or Kerberos issue.

You should not get that error with a local account.

Hi - thanks for your reply. I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea - the way in which Lion Server is described in the App Store seems to suggest that essentially anyone can use it, I have now realised this is very much not the case!

As far as I am concerned at this point I would be perfectly happy to just delete Server in order to be able to get back into my computer. Do you have any suggestions as to whether or not this is possible? Or if it is a case of changing settings in Server, how I go about actually getting into the App in order to do so whilst I cannot login into any of my user accounts?

Thanks a lot.

I have seen other posts regarding this error under different circumstances where they have managed to fix the issue by logging into a 'root' account. Is it possible to set this up without being able to log in to any of the other user account to access terminal?

I have now managed to gather more information through the Console at the login screen. When I put the user login details in here it returns the following:

"Could not get real path of user account (uid: 501): home directory: /Network/Servers/server.xxxx.local/Shared Items/Public/xxxx: the operation couldnbt be completed. No such file or directory. Using home directory.
No home directory: /Network/Servers/server.xxxx.local/Shared Items/Public.xxxx".

Can anyone think of any way this information could be used to fix the issue?

Apologies for the constant posting but I can currently get no work done as a result of not being able to login to the machine.

Thanks.

Before you installed Lion Server on the iMac there was a local user no doubt. Even if the local user gets deleted during the Lion Server install (not sure that it would) there will be a Local Administrator user on the server. Network users like the logs suggest that are being used have been setup for network home folders and the fact that they can't be found suggests other path problems or services not running.

The local account is the key to getting logged into the iMac. You can try Local Adminisrtrator (case sensitive) but yoiu would have to know the password. You can also try diradmin as the username, again the password you would have to know.

Hi there - thanks a lot for your responses. It turns out that by creating a new Server Admin account it allowed me to change the Local Directory settings and delete the original Administrator account - after a day of panic it was finally resolved!