Lion Server App won’t login – Here’s the fix

If you’ve had trouble logging into the Lion Server App (not Server Admin, the other one) after setting up your server… it’s probably not your fault. While troubleshooting the issue on a client’s brand new Mac Mini Server, one of our consultants — Tito Lauro — found a knowledge base article with a great fix. Initially, it may appear that your credentials are incorrect but it’s most likely related to an unloaded background process (daemon) called “servermgrd.” Even if you configured the server properly, this daemon may not load.

In the KBase article, Apple posted a terminal command to see if the daemon is running and another command to kick it into gear.

To check if servermgrd is loaded, see the output of this command in Terminal:

sudo launchctl list | grep -q com.apple.servermgrd && echo loaded || echo not loaded

If the output is “not loaded”, load the com.apple.servermgrd job into launchd with this command:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

As always if you don’t feel comfortable in terminal you can contact us to help.