GPO Processing -Allways wait for the network at computer startup - What do you choose

Hi All,

We're using Windows XP SP3 and are experiencing very long boot times. I've managed to narrow it down to our GPO for "Allways wait for the network at computer startup / logon".

We currently enable this option. This has worked well since all our GPO's will be processed as we would expect before logon. However things have moved on since I implemented this over 4 years ago. We use Scriptlogic as our login script processor and this can do pretty much anything we want in terms of mapping drives, printers, running software etc.

With the option enabled as I said above, our boot times from powering on to displaying the Ctrl Alt Del page was 4mins 10 secs on an Dell Latitude D530 laptop (2GB Ram).

If I disable that option, the boot time decreases to an impressive 35 seconds. A significant difference.

I understand that if I move to this setting certain GPO's might take 2 reboots before they become active. My question is;

1) What do you do? Do you wait for the network or let the GPO's process in the background?

2) Any gotcha's I need to watch out for if I move to this quicker boot. I know that if a students profile doesn't exist, their login will take longer first time around.

Many thanks for any help you can give.

Regards

Leonard

I'd really want to look at what it is about your GPOs which is taking so long - you really want them to complete quickly rather than letting them carry on in the background.

you havnt got a script being applied with a pause command in it have you?.. M ight be worth setting startup scripts to visible and enabling verbose messages computer config\admin templates\system i believe

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Originally Posted by leonard.powers

If I disable that option, the boot time decreases to an impressive 35 seconds. A significant difference.

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Sure but you have to ask yourself what settings have actually been applied in that 35 secs? Allowing someone login before all the security settings have been applied is (in my book) not a great idea.

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1) What do you do? Do you wait for the network or let the GPO's process in the background?

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*always* wait for network. Before I started here the previous incumbent left this unset and the pupils knew they could login and quickly make a mess of things before all the restrictions were in place. Once this was altered they couldn't do that anymore ;)

My kids would be climbing up the wall waiting for 4 mins login times ... Mine is enabled and my boot times are 5-10 seconds. I have the DNS settings in the workstations pointing at the local domian DNS server (makes a big difference in login times) and mandatory profiles. Is it the domain policy or one of your own thats causing the problem? try disabling all gpo's exept the default domain policy and work upwards from there by reenabling a policy at a time until you identify the one thats taking the time ... (it could be the default domian policy of course)

you havnt got dns pointing at your isp servers have you rather than using dns forwarding on the server?

Always wait is enabled - and probably always will be.

Before this was enabled we were getting issues reported (can't remember exactly what they were as this was a long time ago) that were down to XP not being fully ready when the user was logged in.

We had amazingly long login times due to redirected start menus with broken shortcuts.

Allways wait for the network at computer start-up - i turned it off and the login went from 10min to 2min.. been testing with samba PDC login time 10 sec.. but not a viable option :(

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Originally Posted by Cools

Allways wait for the network at computer start-up - i turned it off and the login went from 10min to 2min.

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10 mins!
There has to be something up with that surely?
My CC4 school can boot and login and be working in much less than that, and that's saying something.

had it all checked and tested the GOPs take so long on 2008 Logs are all fine DNS is fine the DHCP is Fine.. , it just takes 10 min.. will have to install 2008 R2 and upgrade form 2008.. unless any can help with any ideas... im up grading to 8g ram in the server from 4GB as the DNS is eating 200MB at a time. ?? that's not right i know, even my perv company server DNS don't eat that much ram..

i have all the computers in the school WOL at 8 am.

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Originally Posted by Cools

had it all checked and tested the GOPs take so long on 2008 Logs are all fine DNS is fine the DHCP is Fine.. , it just takes 10 min.. will have to install 2008 R2 and upgrade form 2008.. unless any can help with any ideas... im up grading to 8g ram in the server from 4GB as the DNS is eating 200MB at a time. ?? that's not right i know, even my perv company server DNS don't eat that much ram..

i have all the computers in the school WOL at 8 am.

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That is horrendous!

How many GPO's apply?

Do you use filtering?

Do you disable Computer / User settings if the policies only apply to the opposing option?

Did your testing narrow it down to a particular one?

i have 29 GPOs (not all of them are used.) just what's listed next.
1 x for all users and extra ( sets basic set-up) 1 for staff (icons and power man) 1 x for students (same as staff and restriction settings) , User settings
1 x all computers 1x staff and 1 x students , Computer Settings

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Do you use filtering?

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No

*** Do you disable Computer / User settings if the policies only apply to the opposing option? *** Yes i have done this.

testing did not narrow down any thing every thing worked fine..

im now going to disable the GPOs and rebuild them with fresh ones..

Did your testing show which policy took the longest to apply though? They may work but it sounds like something is timing out but not causing a fatal error.

So for boot up you have two policies applying to computers, and logging in two policies applying to users.

Filtering should be avoided if at all possible, good news there you aren't using it.

Good practice with disabling the unused settings.

I will run a test to see what ones takes the longest i cant remember off hand..