Group policy intermittent on wireless laptops

[sloughman]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help

 

In the last couple of days I have had an intermittent problem with logging on to laptops wirelessly, wired connections have no issues. A user will log on, but group policies will not have applied. ie folder redirections (desktop, start up menu,) network drives etc. Any given laptop may work three or four times correctly and then on the fourth or fifth decide to not work. There is a managed wireless network here, I know it's not specific to a given AP as I have tried in different rooms. I have rebooted both the controller and APs. It affects both Dell and Toshiba laptops. I have made no changes to the network. In event viewer it tells me error code 1055 about failing to load GPOs. Would enabling the group policy startup policy processing time make any difference. I am not sure if it is Laptop based, or Wireless Controller/AP based, or even Server based.

 

Any pointers would be good thanks

Edited October 23, 2014 by sloughman

[witch]

Can you enable Verbose Logging to see if a particular GP is getting "stuck"?

[sloughman]

I'll give it a blast but my instinct tells me the problem is elsewhere.....

[simpsonj]

I've blogged about this issue here: Wireless and Power settings - Blogs - EduGeek.net

 

But I'll also add that ensuring you have a fast wireless connection is vital. I've recently bought 5Ghz cards for some dell laptops and the speed and reliablilty increase is phenomenal. I'll also add that make sure your offline files are set correctly in GPO. I used to have them really locked down, but this caused a lot more grief as Windows really likes to be able to use Sync centre (assuming your on Win7).

 

I now have the following two GPOs set for students and my performance is far more reliable, with less issues of folders not redirecting, drives not mapping etc:

 

Admin Templates - Network - Offline Files - Remove 'Make Available Offline' - Enabled

Admin Templates - System - Folder Redirection - Do not automatically make redirected folders available offline - Enabled

[sloughman]

Good blog, but what I don't understand is why this has just started happening...

[sloughman]

Well after some sort of non-technical testing, I have found that if I start the laptops , leave them at the windows log in screen for a minute or two, then log in then all will log-in with no intermittancy, , all seems to be fine, group policy applies. So clearly something is going on in the background.....but what does this tell me, is it my wireless network, is it the laptops ?. I have found something out, but really I am no further....any ideas anyone ? And why has it just started happening ?

[witch]

Is there a newer wireless driver you could try?

[sloughman]

Have been thinking along those lines but it affects different types of laptops with different cards.....so I'm not sure, that' s the issue, but i may try tomorrow...

[sloughman]

A thought occurred to me whilst driving home...it always happens that way....just over a week ago I trimmed down the students' profile, resulting in quicker log on (on a wireless laptop as much as 40 seconds quicker). So my guessing is, during the longer "user profile service" it allowed the network to fully initialise and then allow group policy to load and deploy. I have just re loaded what I removed the other week to the longer loading profiles and it now works and group policy deploys (but every time not intermittently ). So by trimming the profile and making a faster logon, great for my wired connections, I have now inadvertently created another problem with the wireless laptops, they seemingly can't initialise the network quick enough for GPOs to deploy. It must be a narrow time window of "opportunity" as 3/4 of the time they do deploy, only a second or two I'm guessing. Edited October 24, 2014 by sloughman

[chilbs]

Have you tried increasing the time the laptop waits on startup before it processes group policy.

 

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]

"GpNetworkStartTimeoutPolicyValue"=dword:0000003c

[psydii]

There are quiet grumblings all over the Internet that previously reliable wifi has become unreliable over the last few weeks, both on Mac and Windows.

 

The inference is that a non disclosed firmware issue has been included in the latest tranche of updates and it is causing the problems.

 

Or maybe it is a coincidence.

 

I expect (hope) a future update either in delivers or kernel will sort things out.