XP SP2 Slow Logon

[punker]

Alright its known fact that XP Pro SP2 and possibly other versions(of XP) have slow domain logon times. Ive read and tried all kinds of stuff. Ive check my DNS, ive done the GPO setting 'Always wait for a network connection', and other solutions i cant quite think of right now. There about 500 computers on our network divided into 28 sites across Canada. We are slow rolling out XP because the first site we did has these mass logon times compared to our previous win2k. Has anyone else struggled with this and come to any conclusion?

[Ghostrider]

What time are we talking for logon to complete...? 30Secs, 1min, 2mins etc. Anyway i have noticed the same thing, i made sure that each workstation had an entry in lmhosts file pointing to the domain, also that each workstation had 1 DNS entry selected to point to the Domain

BTW... is it a W2000 or W2003 Domain server and is DNS setup correctly on It..?

[punker]

Timewise it takes about 30 seconds some days to 15minutes others, now on our WAN sites tend to lean towards 8-10 minutes on average. I havent manually entered the info into lmhosts, but we do have DNS setup correctly and have AD running on the network setup properly, so it should be handed down however good old M$ never seems to surprise me. We are running Win2k3 on our DC.

[Ghostrider]

30 secs is good, i usually find about a min is average, try the lmhost file entries too.

Here is a handy tool to help create a hosts and lmhosts file

Hosts file editor

[punker]

alright thx, i'll give it a go.

[tarquel]

I'm not sure why, but with my 2003 domain, I have to specify the local DNS server's ip (in this case, the DC & DNS server is the same server) in the TCP/IP settings for the computer(s) toi authenticate straight away, instead of wait up to 15min for logon to finish....

could it be this reason or something similar?

just my two cents

Regards,

N.

[Ghostrider]

This is exactly the problem, more people need to realise that all these settings should be input for login to be optimised. 5 mins+ is not normal and each domain setup is different, some are nodes on the net, some are behind routers etc, it all makes a difference.

[punker]

Ok, so instead of relying on DHCP to properly hand that DNS info down, what you guys are saying is to manually enter it into the hosts file on each PC?

[Ghostrider]

Yep... it all helps..