DavidD

iom100 (Ian Miller) had the answer. The problem was coming from the Novell client being above the Windows client in the list of network providers. I moved the Windows client to the top of the list and now accessing my 2012 file server is zippy. No 25 second timeouts every 5 minutes. It's just as fast as the Novell servers. All the time. Sweet. Thanks Ian. I owe you a beer if you're ever in Georgia (USA). The only down side is that it seems that changing the provider order is something that has to be done by hand on each machine. I found a vbscript that could do it for XP, although the posts there said Win7 didn't like the script. Ah well. Can't have it all, I guess. Maybe instead of doing that, we'll just uninstall the Novell client altogether. Again, thanks for all the help.

@sonofsanta - If your script needs to create accounts then assign the timezone, the trick is to use Test-MAPIconnectivity against the last account you created and wait until it returns success before looping through and setting the timezone, customattributes,etc. Here is the function to do that that I use in my script: Function Wait_for_MAPI($AddrToCheck) { $sleeptime = 60 #number of seconds to sleep per loop $maxattempts = 180 #number of times to loop before giving up - 3 hours $testresult=(Test-MapiConnectivity $AddrToCheck).Result $attempts = 0 While (($testresult -ne "Success") -and ($attempts -lt $maxattempts) ) { Sleep -s $sleeptime; $testresult=(Test-MapiConnectivity $AddrToCheck).Result $attempts++ } if ( $testresult -eq "Success" ) { return $true } else { return $false } } So basically create your user accounts, then call wait_for_mapi, giving it the email address of the last account created. If it returns true, loop through and set the timezones, customattributes,etc. If it returns false, well, something went wrong.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. I spent some time last Thursday cleaning some of the fuzz out of DNS, and I think that helped a bit. And at least now I know my DNS is fairly solid going forward. After more testing this morning, I'm starting to think that the main issue (slowness when opening MSOffice files) is really being caused by Office, not Server 2012 or AD. When I first reboot my computer, my addresses spreadsheet opens in 1 or 2 seconds. And if I try re-opening the file every minute, it opens instantly every time for the first four minutes. Then at five minutes, when I try to open the file, there is a 24-25 second delay (the Excel spash screens sits there saying "Contacting \\fs1\blahblah\addresses.xls.) before the file actually opens. Then for the next 4 minutes, the file opens immediately, then at the 5 minute mark gives the 24 second delay, then 4 more minutes of opening immediately, etc... Does that sound familiar to anyone? Funny enough, if I put a copy of my spreadsheet on the Novell server, it opens immediately every single time, no matter how long I wait. So it's like Office is doing something weird because the file is on a Windows server. I've also tested with a plain text file saved to the same directory as the spreadsheet. The text file opens in Notepad immediately every time, there's no "5-minute cycle". Even if I edit the file from another computer (to be sure my machine isn't opening a cached version in the background). So that tells me loud and clear that the server is serving files in a timely fashion like all of you said it would. So it seems to be all down to Office. I've tried saving my XLS spreadsheet as XSLX, thinking maybe Office 2013 was doing something weird with that old binary format, but even as an xslx file, it's still following the 5-minute-cycle. I've tried setting the file server as a trusted location in Excel, disabling the File Integrity checker, even setting some strange registry settings for "SuppressionPolicy" that the PC guy here suggested, but nothing yet has broken the 5-minute cycle. If no one here has any further suggestions, I'll go bother the fine folks in the Office Software forum. Thanks again for the help. Dave [as a starting point for other Novell-turned-MS admins who may come here via Google wondering what the Windows equivalent of dsrepair is, here are 5 low-level ActiveDirectory diagnostic/troubleshooting commands I found in the past week. All will give you (lots of) help with a /? on the end... dcdiag - this one seems to be the big-daddy troubleshooting command - sort of like dstrace and dsrepair rolled into one, and then some. dnscmd - does dns stuff dfsrdiag - diagnostics for DFS ntfrsutil repadmin ]

The clients all point to ns1 and ns2 for their DNS service. One other thing I've noticed, especially on my workstation (2012R2), is that the Group Policy management console is really slow when I first open it. Say I open gpmc, then click on a policy object. GPMC will pause for 10-15 seconds while it grabs the policy. If I close gpmc and restart it, there is no pause when I click on an object, it's immediately there. This does sound like a DNS issue, but I've checked DNS and all the server/service records (ie - the MS specific stuff) look like they are there for the DCs. I think I'll look around and see if I can find a list of what server records are expected to be in DNS, just to make sure I'm not missing any.

Here are the basic details of the Windows servers: five 2012 servers - DC1 was the first server I installed. NS1 and NS2 are DCs that I built specifically to do DNS and DHCP. The DHCP leases they hand out specify them in the name server field. RAD1 and RAD2 are member servers that do RADIUS for our Aruba system. FS1 is a member server that is doing file serving. All of the servers use static IPs. After reading FN-GM's reply this morning, I took a look at DNS. Strangely, FS1 didn't have a record there, so I manually added an A record for it. (Is manually adding A records still considered a "good idea"?) The settings for the NIC said to register the connection's settings in DNS, so I'm not sure why it didn't register itself. I'll look into that. Maybe something is screwed up. So I could see the missing DNS record being the cause of the "initial slowness" when opening/connecting to a drive for the first time, since it will eventually drop back to WINS. I do have a WINS server, embarrassingly it is running on Windows 2000. Yeah, there's no "3" on the end of that, it's a 2000 server that's been running 24/7 since ~2002. I will replace that pronto. As far as the storage disks, there are eight 10k SAS disks in RAID 5 (I know, I know...), I'm guessing 6 gig since this is a Gen8 box. I looked this morning and the old Novell server has pretty much the same disks in it and is also RAID 5. I think I'll setup a test file server running 2012 on another box and see if I get the same sluggishness. Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions. I greatly appreciate it. Dave

Hello all, I'm new here, in fact I just found these forums today when googling about slow file server access on Windows 2012. I work at a small private college in Georgia, so I'm guessing I'm among peers here. I just last week finished migrating our file shares from Novell OES2 to Windows2012. So far, I am less than impressed, and my users are even less impressed. I started building the infrastructure last summer with all new hardware - HP DL380's Gen 8. Nice gear that is. Since we were shaking off the shackles of ancient Novell, I decided to go whole-hog with Windows and move us straight to 2012, the latest and greatest. I got the first DC setup, then DNS/DHCP servers, then RADIUS servers. All was well. Then I spent a few months figuring out how to migrate 3000 accounts and groups from eDirectory into AD. Then I setup the new fileserver and spent another month figuring out how to migrate files and map drives. (Powershell was helpful with the AD account/group stuff, but the file stuff really came back to simple batch files). I finally settled on using GPO preferences to map the drives. From what I could find, that seems to be the direction MS is heading. So after Christmas, I started migrating mapped drives, starting with the two least important drives. After I moved those first two drives, I did notice that accessing files on the new 2012 server from my desktop (also a 2012 server,...) was more "laggy" than it had been with the Novell server. The biggest problem seemed to be the looooong 10-15 second pause when I'd first access a drive - I'm guessing my Windows client and the fileserver are doing key-exchange stuff in the background that Novell never did. That was unpleasant after spending the last 15 years running speedy Novell where you double-click the drive and boom, there's your stuff. But since nobody much was using those drives, I decided to keep going. After the first two drives, I took a long pause while the PC guys got the rest of the computers joined to the new AD domain. By late March, they were finished, so I started moving drives again, starting with the least "critical" and slowly moving along, finishing up last week. So far, here are the issues I've wondered about: 1. Do Windows logins always take soooo looonng? Some computers are taking 30+ seconds to apply the GPO settings. Most computers get three fairly simple GPO's - one does 5 or 6 drive mappings, one sets 8 rules in the Windows firewall, and the third prohibits running exe's from APPDATA. I realize the client is doing key-exchange stuff with whichever DC it's talking to before it downloads the GPOs, but wow, this seems slow. Is this "normal" for Windows? 2. Is there any good way to alleviate the long pause when first accessing files/folders/drives on the fileserver? I've tried setting the mslanmanager AutoDisconnect to 10 hours, but that hasn't seemed to help much, if any. I've also munged around today with the RequireSecuritySignature setting via GPO, but won't know if that helps any until tomorrow. 3. Are Windows2012 fileservers just "slower" than Novell fileservers? My old Novell box was an HP DL360 G7 machine that's 4 years old, but it runs circles around the new Gen8 2012 fileserver. I don't have a SAN here, so both boxes are using DAS. Nor do I use DFS. Do I need to start managing expectations with my users? I've had complaints from our head Accountant (who loves terribly complicated and inter-linked Excel spreadsheets) who said that opening his spreadsheets is now "painfully slow". Also, our Financial Aid folks are complaining that their mail merges are moving at a glacial pace. So far, all I've managed to tell them is "I'm working on it". I've read the threads here about Server 2012 not responding, and the more recent one about Office files being slow to open. Some of the posts there sound sort of like the problems I'm having here, although my server doesn't stop responding (that I know of), it's just slow at responding. Maybe I should have used 2008 or 2003 for my file server? Are they generally faster/better at serving files than 2012? Thanks, Dave