Help with slow wireless logon :(:(

[jamin100]

Hopefully someone can help me . .

 

I have 60 laptops (toshiba A100's) that are spread over 4 laptop trolleys. Each trolley has 2 x D-Link 7100 access points. Each accesspoint is operating on a different channel.

 

The access points are configured using WEP and each point has 7 or 8 laptops connecting to it.

 

Now, all the student profiles are super mandatory with redirected start menu's and desktop folders. I've also redirected the applications folder to the main server.

 

The mandatory profile is 2.12MB. I use the windows wireless configuration to connect to the access points...

 

MY DNS scope is *.*.152.100 to *.*.153.255. My DC and DNS server both reside on the *.*.152 range and the access points on the *.*.153 range. I can ping them all from any machine on the network.

 

The access points are connected to a 10/100 MPBS switch which is then connected to a 1000 GBPS switch.

 

The problem is, some laptops can take an age to logon and by an age i mean 15 minutes +. I also find that the start menu often takes a while to load all the icons so the user is sitting there with just a grey box that should be full of icons.

 

Can anyone help me speed up the logins ??

 

TIA

[jamin100]

bump . . . . .

[ful56_uk]

with them AP's have you got load balanced switched on? it sounds like they are all connecting to the same AP, switch load balance on then set the max to 10 clients and split the trolley over the to ap so half are on one ap and the other on the other

[Michael]

I've worked with some D-Link 7100 access points in the past and they're just not that great compared to HP.

 

It sounds like you have the right idea to keep speed up, so I can't really suggest anything else other than resetting the access points to factory default.

[jamin100]

Thanks for the replies ...

 

To answer some of your questions:

 

@Gibbo

1. The domain admin logon is 30-40 seconds login time.

2. All the drivers were updated over the summer on the new images and were straight from intel

3. The speed of the laptop is great once the programms are running.

 

@ful56_uk

There is not an option on the WAP's to load balance. I have given them all different SSID's (MOPWAP1, MOBWAP2 etc . .) and have configured half the clients to connect to 1 and the other half to connect to 2

[jmcdermott]

My solution is a bit long winded and took a long time to setup, but have now got wireless laptops logon down to about 1 min with 20 logging on at one time.

 

The solution goes as follows:

 

1) I created a local user on each laptop called laptop, and set it to auto login at start up.

 

2) I then used VB to create a custom logon page that open up before explorer.exe.

 

3) The program prompts for a user name and password, the verifys details against active directory. Then if successful maps all drivers (home dir, public, multimedia, and student temp.) Then copies all start menu and desktop icons to a local folder.

 

4) then loads explorer.exe

 

there is a few draw backs, such as user rights to some folders, and students are not able to change there passwords, and staff can not log on at all.

 

This seems to work for us.

[jamin100]

@ful56_uk

I've had another look at the settings page and there is a load balancing option.

 

I've enabled this and set it to 8 and have also enabled lin Integrate which i 'think' makes the 2 access point act as 1, and load balances the clients between them.

 

I'm just adjusting 1 trolley of laptops and will test it out this afternoon

[ricki]

HI

 

This would be what I would do.

 

Connect the laptops to the network and check to see if the logon time is ok.

 

If the logon is the laptops are ok and its the wifi.

 

Next check that the wifi routers are set up with different names and have different channel that are at least 3 channels apart. The set half of the laptops to use one and set the other half to the other.

 

Now turn the wifi off on the laptop and plu it into the wifi router and check the logon is still ok. This will rule out if the router has a poor connection.

 

Update the driver for the wifi card and have a look at the bios version.

 

Try the laptop on the wifi and how it doing.

 

Try moving the router and the laptop to another part of the building and see if it gets better. I had a problem at one school where a heating pump when running would kill the wifi in part of the building.

 

Now try turning the encryption off on an access point just for a test and see if that helps. Remember to turn it back on.

 

Now you could turn debugging on to see what is slowing the log on times down. I have seen radius servers not working correctly and not responding to clients promptly.

 

Other things I have seen slow them down would be sophos and windows updates battering the connection because the machines have not been plugging in for a bit. I have also had to delete profiles from machines.

 

Just some ideas.

 

Good luck with the problem.

 

Richard

[jamin100]

HI

 

This would be what I would do.

 

Connect the laptops to the network and check to see if the logon time is ok.

DONE-OK

 

If the logon is the laptops are ok and its the wifi.

 

Next check that the wifi routers are set up with different names and have different channel that are at least 3 channels apart. The set half of the laptops to use one and set the other half to the other.

DONE - OK

Now turn the wifi off on the laptop and plu it into the wifi router and check the logon is still ok. This will rule out if the router has a poor connection.

DONE-OK

 

Update the driver for the wifi card and have a look at the bios version.

DONE-OK

Try the laptop on the wifi and how it doing.

 

Try moving the router and the laptop to another part of the building and see if it gets better. I had a problem at one school where a heating pump when running would kill the wifi in part of the building.

DONE- SAME IN ALL AREAS

 

Now try turning the encryption off on an access point just for a test and see if that helps. Remember to turn it back on.

DONE - It is faster without encryption but turning it off is not really and option

 

Now you could turn debugging on to see what is slowing the log on times down. I have seen radius servers not working correctly and not responding to clients promptly.

 

Other things I have seen slow them down would be sophos and windows updates battering the connection because the machines have not been plugging in for a bit. I have also had to delete profiles from machines.

WSUS is not enabled for laptops but we do have sophos ??

 

Just some ideas.

 

 

Good luck with the problem.

 

Richard

 

Thanks

 

 

[maniac]

Just out of interest, how many GPO's do you have applying to the laptops, as I found it was the number of GPO's and their complexity that was slowing down laptop logons for me. We also had the 'always wait for network at startup and logon' option switched on which slowed things down as the laptops would re-copy all the GPOs from the server everytime someone logged on. I find laptops work better without this option, as they will use the cached versions stored on them, which should be OK unless you've made changes in which case it can sometimes take 2 or 3 restarts for new GPO's to apply, but they will eventually.

 

Mike.

[jamin100]

I there's about 4 GPO's being applied to the laptops but they shouldnt hold that much information between them..

 

Where is the setting that states "wait for network"

[maniac]

From memory I can't remember, but it's somewhere under computer configuration. I would use GPMC on your server to look at your GPO's to see if this setting is applied; it quite often is as it means GPO changes get applied immediatly which is always handy. Turning it off for our laptops cerainly made a difference to logon times.

 

Mike.

[eean]

WSUS is not enabled for laptops but we do have sophos ??

 

Sophos insists on downloading it's updates on logon. I've read threads on here about sophos and some people have stopped using it because it was seriously slowing down logon. Try searching for Sophos - also try temporally removing it to check. It doesn't seem possible to schedule updates for a set time or randomising it so it doesn't effect all laptops at once.

[renegade]

We had a batch of 72 of those Toshibas which had Realtek cards in them. Toshiba took one away and found the cards to be faulty so they are replacing them all with Atheros cards (under warranty). With the replacement cards in they work an absolute treat!!

[jamin100]

We had a batch of 72 of those Toshibas which had Realtek cards in them. Toshiba took one away and found the cards to be faulty so they are replacing them all with Atheros cards (under warranty). With the replacement cards in they work an absolute treat!!

 

Ours already have Atheros cards in them, so they must have identified the problem before they shipped them out to us.