(moved from stackoverflow...)

Symptoms

So at work we have OSX 10.7.3 installed and every once in a while I will see the following behaviors:

1) if the screen is locked, then multiple tries of the same user/pass are not accepted.

2) if the screen is unlocked, then opening a new bash term may yield prompts such as:

`I have no name$`

or

lkyrala$ ssh lkyrala@ah-lkyrala2u 
You don't exist, go away!

Even when our macs are working normally, everyone here has to login twice. The first time after boot always fails, but the second time (with the same password, not changing anything, just pressing enter again) succeeds. Weird?

Workarounds

There are some workarounds that resolve the immediate problem, but don't prevent it from happening again:

a) wait (maybe an hour or two) and the problems sometimes go away by themselves.

b) kill 'opendirectoryd' and let it restart. (from https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3663559)

c) hold the power button to reset the computer

Discussion

Now, the evidence above points me to something screwy with opendirectory and login credentials. Some other people report having these login problems, but it's hard to determine where the actual problem is (Mac, or network environment?).

I should add that most of the network are Windows machines, but we have quite a few Macs and Linux machines as well, but I'm not sure of the details of how the network auth is mapped from various domains to others... all I know is that our network credentials work in Windows domains as well as mac and linux logins -- so something is connecting separate systems, or using the same global auth system.