Logins and Redirected Folders

[RuralGeek]

Hi All,

 

School is now out and its time for me to catch up on some projects I have been putting off. Our domain is currently in 2003 mode, but for the most part is running on a 2008 r2 servers (still need to upgrade one more dc). Right now I am working on speeding up our login times for windows 7 clients.

 

Heres the times:

Non-cached logins take approximately 1:10 seconds

Cached logins: 6.5 seconds

 

Times were measured with the goofy blackberry stopwatch

 

I decided to move both a domain user and win 7 computer to a test OU that does not contain any group policies. We currently run about 10-12 different policies depending upon ou. I started adding them one by one and the login speed never increased past 7.5 seconds...untill I added our "my documents redirection" policy. Once the policy was added it increased the login time by a full minute. So now to my question: does anyone know any steps I can take to further diagnose this? Heres what I have done:

 

1. Removed all policies except the my document redirection policy, thought maybe there was a conflict somewhere with another policy -still 1 minute increase

2. Tried creating a new policy and instead of using "users home directory", I tried a unc path. - still 1 minute increase

3. Applied a hotfix listed in Windows 7 Gotcha's - still 1 minute increase

 

I'm still sorting through the group policy logs in windows 7 but am not seeing any errors. At this location the network is running 1gb switches. We create the home folders for users using ADUC. The DCs and file servers at this location are running Windows 2008 R2. I appreciate any help anyone can give me. Thank you

[pseu]

I am not going to claim experience with this, but assume it is the syncing of the two locations that is causing the problem.

 

You may want to try just having the home drive mapped when the user logs on and asking the users to use their home drive instead of their "my documents". You could even make the mapped home drive take the place of the "my documents" folder on the local system. The only problem with this is if they lose network connectivity they will not have access to the files. If logon problems are an issue and you do not want to wait for the locations to be synced, you may need to rely on them backing up their own crap to the home drive.

 

Maybe even setting the sync options on the folder itself will get around your problem since it will likely take place after the user is already logged on.

 

Please post back with your solution. I am curious to hear what you do.

[RuralGeek]

Thanks for your help Pseu,

 

I spoke with our Tech Coordinator about this issue. What were going to do is make everyone on the lab computers use the Z:\ (There home folder) drive and no folder redirection. On the teachers computers we will use a loopback and have the "my documents" redirected. Generally they don't ever experience the delay since we setup there computers and there login is already cached. I think this is the best Win-Win for everyone. The login speeds are something we drastically miss from our netware days.

 

Thanks again for your time and help