Group Policies not always applying Windows 7 wireless

[Cooners]

Hi

 

I'm having issues at one school where the group policy's are not always applying. They are logging in and losing desktops, documents etc also printers aren't mapping, unfortunately it never seems to happen when I'm there. I have startup policy processing time set to 5mins and always wait for the network at computer startup and logon set but they are still reporting this fault. Any idea what might be causing it?

 

Many Thanks

[Zenden]

is the wireless being managed by windows or a third party program? if it is windows, is the service set to startup automatic?

[Michael]

With regards to your wireless encryption, I've found if you have WPA-PSK with optional TKIP or AES, this creates problems like you describe. Forcing the wireless mode on your Wireless Access Points to WPA2-PSK AES and the problems go away.

 

Upgrading drivers - especially if they're Atheros adapters is also recommended.

 

I agree with the above, let Win 7 itself manage wireless connections. There's zero benefit since XP to use a third party application. I could understand for Win 2000 or older as they didn't natively support wireless.

[Zenden]

I second michaels point about forcing aes, not just for this reason but I have found multiple encryption types actually reduced performance with our wifi.

[Michael]

That's my experience too - multiple encryption types for a single SSID isn't recommended, plus AES is considerably more secure than TKIP. I believe all future wireless encryption standards will be based on AES only.

[Cooners]

Ok checked that in the zone director (they have ruckess wifi) and it is already set to WPA AES. I will try updating the wifi card drivers next time I'm out there. Any other ideas?

[Zenden]

just a thought here - you have it set to "wait for the network" but it is possibly timing out before applying any GPOs. Have these devices ever applied the GPOs (via a cable maybe?). If this issue has always been happening then it has never actually applied the wait for the network setting or the policy processing time. bit of a chicken or egg situation possibly.

[witch]

Dont know if this helps but I recently had an issue where the group policy mapping the drives would randomly not apply. I found this solution and it does seem to have worked for me:

 

"I have seen an issue where there seems to be a bug in the group policy preferences that map the drive letters,and it is related to one of the settings. It's the tick box that mentions about doing the mapping in the users security context. It doesn't seem to affect anything if you untick this, but if it's ticked it can cause the sort of behaviour you are seeing."

[Cooners]

Hi, yes I believe the group policy has been applied as I've forced it and 9/10 times everything works fine. I'll double check though. I don't think I have any GPP stuff set but again I'll check. Thanks for the ideas so far, any more would be welcome as the the school are starting to get annoyed about this issue as it mucks so much stuff up.

[Zenden]

is it always the same laptops or the same model laptops? do different model laptops work ok?

[Cooners]

Ok

I've finally got back out there (I only really get out there once a month as I have so many schools to deal with 2 days a week). I've tried everything on here to no avail , dell haven't updated the wifi drivers and

It seems to only be the Dell Vostro 3560's that are causing the headache but they are the only Windows 7 laptops there. I've actually found one doing it myself now, if I log it on and off a few times it fails once or twice in ten logins and with I run gpupdate /force and log off it seems to solve the problem until I shut down (although that could have just been luck) so I have written them a small batch file the teachers can run to sort the issue quickly for now but it's only a stop gap and I'd like this sorted because there seeing it as a ton of different issues (due to all the side effects).

[spc-rocket]

Hiya,

 

You need to make sure that the network is given enough time to make the connection. Most of the time this is the issue with wireless cards is that windows boots faster and tries to looks for GPO processing etc before the network stack is initialised. To make the station wait for x amount of seconds try the following registry entry on one of the laptop to see if it consistently picks up the network at start. If it does you can roll this out using GPP or other method.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840669

 

The article will state that this is only valid for xp and 2000 but it does also apply to windows 7 as well --> Windows 7 Clients intermittently fail to apply group policy at startup

 

See how you get on with this.

 

Ash.

 

 

 

 

 

Hi

 

I'm having issues at one school where the group policy's are not always applying. They are logging in and losing desktops, documents etc also printers aren't mapping, unfortunately it never seems to happen when I'm there. I have startup policy processing time set to 5mins and always wait for the network at computer startup and logon set but they are still reporting this fault. Any idea what might be causing it?

 

Many Thanks

[dany2010]

Have you tried setting the power option on the laptops to max performance?

 

We ad a nightmare with wireless and it sometimes not connecting, switched the power settings over and all went away.

[clgeek]

Cooners, did you every figure something out. We have ruckus wireless and dell laptops. The mapped drive show up, but I cannot push any applications out or batch files to the wireless computers, but if I plug the computer via ethernet cord, it will work on the first reboot..

 

ANY THOUGHTS??