I was unlucky enough two months ago to start to experience loss of my (computer) identity, occasionally at wake froms sleep. My computer terminal would show “I have no name!” in the prompt instead of my user name, would claim that I am 501, when it should say I’m koalie. Of course, ssh would not want me, telling me to go away as I don’t exist. So I rebooted a couple time and grumbled a lot.
Vlad suggested something was wrong with LDAP and my colleague Thomas diagnosed that opendirectoryd was crashing. All true.
It happened again tonight and Vlad found a way to restart opendirectoryd (in Terminal.app):
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.opendirectoryd
Which restarts opendirectoryd.
I’m none the wiser on what triggers the opendirectoryd crash at wake from sleep. But I’m glad this works when the crash happens.
Update: The above doesn’t always work. Actually, it may have worked just once. Since then, I’ve experienced silent opendirectoryd crash, and no sudo worked, neither some kill -9. Only a restart can fix it.
koalie’s contemplations in markup 