Active Directory Slow Logon

[ski_guy]

I am not sure if this is the correct area to post this so please forgive me if it should be in a different one. Firs of all, I understand there are a million reasons why a login might be slow in a Windows domain. I have been working on/researching this issue for some time and found it is not an easy problem to isolate. I will provide you with what I have and know and hopefully will come out with more knowledge than I have now, or even better a solution. The problem is very intermittent, and mostly happens on certain types of laptops. The laptops are the IBM T60 series. There are known issues with the Gigabit nics on these and I have taken steps to rule that out. It happens on fresh installs and ones that have been around a while. Whether it has something to do the with the T60 i have no idea, this is just an observation where it happens most commonly. We have a 2 domain setup with a trust in place. All domain controllers are Server 2003 R2. All clients are Windows XP. This occurs very rarely, maybe only 2 or 3 times a week out of many many users. It only happens when a computer is plugged into our network, never when they are taken home. It also tends to happen early in the morning, when not everyone is here yet. Once a machine is powered on the login screen comes up normally. After putting in your credentials the laptop will hang for anywhere from 5 minutes to over an hour when the problem is occurring. It will sit at the "Running startup scripts" message. This happens with new profiles and users that have logged on several times to the computer. I have disabled as many services as I can think of that might cause this, but based on logging from the netlogon log, I don't believe a local service is causing this. Who knows though. Attached is the log from one of the machines that had this happen recently. I can speculate on what may be causing this, but I am not very familiar with this log. The login was entered at 7:01 and the message to run startup scripts was displayed at 7:04. I never got to the desktop, it just sat there. A hard reboot was performed at 8:11. If anyone can shed some light on what may be happening here or has experienced this same problem please let me know.
Thanks

 

[renegade X]

This is quite common actually. Usually the cause is the drive that the database is located on. Try moving the database to another drive. If available, check any performance baselines that you may have to compare to. Also, check the DNS console for errors. DNS can cause this as well.

*EDIT*- If these two do not help, use NETMON or some other tool to capture the packets on the wire at the time when trying to join one to the domain.

 

[ski_guy]

Thanks for the reply. Which DC (from the log) would you point to first?

 

[renegade X]

domaincontroller.domain.com appears to be the primary, yes? Since you have multiple DCs, an additional thing to check over the wire is replication. The SYSVOL directory may have to be moved to another drive as well.