OS X Server clone and password issues

[@msterdamned]

Hi, I am trying to work out the best way to create disk images of my servers.

So I have created non compressed Read Only disk image of my main Open Directory Master server to a remote volume. I copied the disk image to a Firewire drive.

I then booted a different tower G4 from an OS X 10.4 DVD, connected th FW drive with the disc image, opened Disk Utility and restored the saved disk image to the new machine. This all went smoothly. Once the restore was finished, I rebooted the test clone server from its internal hard drive and it all started up fine. I left this new cloned machine off of the network as I did not want it to conflict with my OD master which was still up and running.

However the test clone does not recognise my admin password. Did I miss a step or do I need to do something differently. I'm guessing the problem was likely caused by Open Directory.

[@msterdamned]

Weird. I can log into the machine at startup using the admin password, however once I hit the desktop and want to make any changes (IE in system preferences) the same password doesn't work anymore but my root password does.

Could this be a permissions problem, some settings I had wrong when making the disk image?

[dnanian]

That's really weird. It's possible that the OD data wasn't fully flushed to disk when we copied it: have you tried copying that server when it was offline?

[@msterdamned]

Thanks for the reply. I haven't tried taking the machine off-line before imaging, its our main file-server and it gets hit from 8am till 8pm everyday (even weekends!) which makes it hard to take down for any length of time. I was hoping SuperDuper's ability to clone the booted HD would help me avoid lengthy downtime while I create Disk Images of all my servers.

Like I said the cloned machine seems to be 100% fine apart from the Admin account issue. Could it be a permissions error of some kind?

[dnanian]

I don't think so; permissions would be copied. I think the files are all OK.

Is there perhaps a way that Apple recommends backing up the Active Directory? If so, you could run that before the backup (even automated with our before script) and then restore it...