Mac opening times unacceptable.

[sidnuts]

Hi there,

We have a windows 2008 R2 AD server for file and print running in a school with PCs/laptops plus 50 or so macs (Snow Leopard) connected to it. AD binding and AD authentication works fine for all machines (after maxing out the DNS wait time thingy in one of the plist files for SL). The problem we have is that when we try and open relatively small documents (1 Mb or thereabouts) from the macs, it can take up to a minute to open when connecting over our managed wireless network. Deeply unacceptable. I shudder to think what sort of performance we'd get for anything larger. It seems marginally faster if we connect via cifs, but nothing to write home about. Windows machines work fine over the wireless. Any ideas?

Many thanks

[mac_shinobi]

Are there any MTU settings for the wireless card ?

 

Just wondering if this will make much of a difference ?

[sidnuts]

Wasn't aware that there was anyway to change any aspects of hardware setup in a mac. But then again, they can be a trifle black-boxish, plus we're relative newbies when it comes to mac diagnostics. Any further info would be gratefully received.

[morganw]

In my experience accessing shares on a Windows 2008 R2 server from Snow Leopard is totally broken, I went to a few companies to get this resolved but no one could help. I ended up switching back to using an OS X server while trying to find a long term solution. Apple is replacing the Samba client with their own custom client for the next OS X release, hopefully this one will actually work. Unfortunately some programs refuse to work using SMB shares as home folders (iPhoto cannot create a new photo library) so you're screwed either way. Apple don't make servers and you cannot virtualise OS X on non-Apple hardware. Welcome to the future.

[FN-GM]

In my experience accessing shares on a Windows 2008 R2 server from Snow Leopard is totally broken.

 

Never had a problem here...

[morganw]

It worked but had horrible (and intermittent) performance issues. Tried tweaking TCP stack parameters, checked forward and reverse DNS, no problems with the infrastructure, went to numerous companies to try and find a solution but no one could offer any assistance. In the end the problem with iPhoto not working meant that I can no longer use this as a viable solution anyway. I'm still trying to get Netatalk working with Kerberos as a long-term replacement but I really hope that Apple will allow people to virtualise OS X installations on any hardware now that they've pulled out of the server market.

[nonmonotonic]

When you say 'open relatively small documents', would these be Word documents? If so your problem is not directly with the server connection but with the way Microsoft needs to too and fro in the Word application. I had an issue with trying to open Powerpoint docs in home directories on a slow wired network. It could take up to 30 minutes to load a Powerpoint presentation with lots of photos. You need to look into local caching to prevent this excessive polling of the network (I just got a faster network, which is not an option in your case).

[nicklec]

Faster with cifs? What other option do you have on a windows server? Your 'dns timeout max' statement sounds like you have something setup wrong.

[sidnuts]

Faster than SMB. The dns timeout change to smb.conf was a suggestion taken from a Mac forum, and did produce a marginal increase in download speed. Checked the MTU Settings on the card, and it's set to the maximum of 1500.