Laptops, Wireless and Roaming Profiles

[button_ripple]

We have 30 laptops in 2 laptop trolleys. We also have a 54g wireless network with a network access point in every other classroom. The laptops work fine except for the issue with logging on. After about 5 laptops have logged on successfully the other laptops either claim that they cannot access the server copy of the roaming profile or they spend ages saying 'loading your personal settings...' for about 10 minutes before loading the administrator profile.

 

Is this a problem with the laptops, or the access points. It definately isn't the server because the ICT suite can have absolutely no problems.

[plexer]

how big is the profile it's trying to suck down.

 

Don't forget the wireless is shared bandwidth.

 

Ben

[Ric_]

This is due to a combination of wireless being slow and roaming profiles being BIG.

 

When using wireless with anything more than 10-15 clients you are gonig to suffer terribly. This is why I use the laptops as thin client devices to avoid the problem.

 

The wireless 'airspace' is shared amongst the clients so a 54Mbps AP shared 30 ways is going to give you 1.8Mbps per client which is actually 113KB/s download and if your roaming profile is a conservative 25MB it will take nearly 4 minutes to download the profile. This is assuming perfect reception which NEVER happens in reality and assumes that you won't get any collisions of the like with all these users caning the network at once.

[button_ripple]

it's 1.2 mb - there is nothing inside them!

[Ric_]

@button_ripple: Plus all the registry keys that group policy changes and if you are using roaming profiles, you will have documents being pulled down too.

 

1.2MB still takes 10.5 seconds to download on a perfect connection.

[button_ripple]

so what can i do about some of the profiles not downloading to the laptops over the wireless connection. I don't really mind how long it takes to download, i just need them to load eventually!!

[richard.thomas]

@button_ripple: Plus all the registry keys that group policy changes and if you are using roaming profiles, you will have documents being pulled down too.

 

1.2MB still takes 10.5 seconds to download on a perfect connection.

 

Not if he's using folder redirection

[Ric_]

@richard.thomas: Then that wouldn't be a true roaming profile (more of a hybrid).

 

@button_ripple: There is very little you can do I'm afraid... options are:

1. Reduce the profile size by an incredible amount and make it mandatory so that it cannot grow

2. Add more APs using a different SSID and configure half the laptops to use the alternative SSID to give some basic load balancing

3. Install a managed wireless infrastructure that will load balance your clients and do other clever bits and pieces

4. Use the laptops as thin clients so that the only data that moves is keystokes and screen refreshes

 

My combination of 3 and 4 seems to work very well.

[jonathan.lees]

Probably a daft question but how do you reduce the profile by an incredible amount, we have Macromedia suite and it dumped 6mb of crap into the profile. Also would it be possible to copy a mandatory profile to the local machine say using robocopy at logon and force it to be used?

[Andi]

We had this exact issue, we had a Colubris AP on each floor of the block in question, with 4 classrooms on each floor. We wanted a total of 24 laptops to connect to the network as a standard workstation, thin client wouldn't work as the laptops would be used for data logging and the like.

 

After about 5 laptops were connected the connection would start to crawl and became unusable, even using a test user with a small as possible profile size, and even then after making sure that the laptop had a copy of the profile locally too so that any profile changes being dragged down were minimal.

 

We then got a company called Pervasive in to give us some advise and to trial some HP thin APs with a managed wireless system.

 

They basically pointed out that our network as it stands was one flat network with a huge address range (Subnet 255.240.0.0), which meant that the wireless APs were getting bombarded with requests from all over the network meaning that they were never going to be able to cope.

 

They setup a seperate address range and vlan for the wireless system and put an AP in each classroom and bingo....24 laptops working like a charm.

 

So....now all i need is the knowledge to vlan off the rest of my network so that I can reduce this broadcast traffic. :s

[wesleyw]

@Ric what software do you use for Thin Clients?

 

 

Wes