Login Freezes For Terminal Services

[Pear]

I have a problem with my terminal service clients. It occurs when staff are synchronising their laptops (thats for another thread !) and the network traffic is high, therefore slowing the connection on the network.

The connection between the thin clients and the terminal server is fine, its only when the gpo settings are being transferred that there is an issue. The screen hangs on applying settings. The terminal servers are on a switch with their clients and have no interference from other sources. But the main AD server is on the core switch alongside the NAS box. I currently have 100mb switches and have been considering upgrading them soon.

Should I promote my terminal servers to AD servers to speed up the login process ? Or is there another way to cache the gpo settings to the terminal server.

Thanks

[Geoff]

Make your terminal servers DCs.
Upgrade your core network to 1gbit.
VLAN your thin client traffic seperately from normal clients.

[CyberNerd]

Have you tried bycle booting the terminal servers.
We suffered from long login times, without network/DC problems and found weekly cycle booting fixed it - the magic of windows

[wlaidlaw]

The first step has got to be tying the fault down to one of the following 3 categories:

*Load on the terminal server. [Use perfmon running from a remote PC to monitor CPU usage]

*Network load between the Terminal Server & DC. [Use network monitoring tools or atleast Network tab in Task Manager on both servers]

*Load on the DC [Use perfmon running from a remote PC to monitor CPU usage]

My guess would be CPU (or possibly disk throghput) on the Terminal server or Network Load.

What type of profiles do you use? By any chance are your profiles stored on your DC?

I would recomend agaist promoting a TS to a DC - bad move from a Security point a view. Also a lot of badly written apps fail as there is no local machine SAM.


Will

[Pear]

I use normal default user profiles stored on the terminal server. From what I have seen when this happens, its not the actual servers being overloaded as the CPU and network usage in task manager for both DC and terminal servers is relatively low.

As a first step I shall try the reboot at the end of the day.

[Ric_]

AFAIK a TS cannot be a DC for the very reason that it is a dumb thing to do - from a security standpoint and a reliability standpoint (all those unstable educational apps!).

You really need the connection between the terminal servers and filestore to be a FAST connection - 100Mbit doesn't cut it. Sticking all your files onto a single NAS box has also caused a bottleneck... this is probably the reason that synchronisation of laptops slows things to a crawl.

If you have SNMP capable switches, use MRTG to monitor bandwidth usage on the key ports.

If you want more advice, feel free to ring me and I'll try to walk you through some stuff... if you need my number again, PM me.