Slow Network Logons.

S

scott23432

Registered
Hello!

I am in charge of a building level network at a primary (k-2) school. The problem I am having with our computer labs is that the student logons are extremely slow.

The lab is running Emacs with 1.25 G4. 512 DDR, and Mac OSX 10.4.7
Appletalk, Bonjour, and LDAPv3 are enabled in Directory Access.
They are also running DHCP for their IP.

The server is a Xserv running Mac OSX Server 10.4.7 with 2 ghz G5 and 512 ddr.

I recently upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.4.7 on the server.
There is one drive that maps on logon.
The dock, System Preferences, and logon are managed for the students in Workgroup Manager.
They are all directly connected to 10/100 switch my office/server room/switch closet.

Dose anyone know a way I can make the network logons faster? It is taking almost 2 to 3 minutes for an average student to load. The funny thing is it is very sporadic. Sometimes they will get on quick and all is well. Some times it tells me their home folder is missing or the dock has all kinds of stuff it’s not supposed to have. Sometimes they can’t even logon! It dose not seem to be a specific computer…. Its random on what logon times or if the student account will work.


Thanks a lot!!!
 
sounds like the server is struggling a bit..

how many users logon?

Can you bump the memory on the server to 1gig or more?
 
Normaly between 15 and 25 students come in at a time.

That is a good idea on the ram upgrade. I will check in to that.
 
is it a 10 or 100 meg network? Can you pickup a GIG switch? They are pretty cheap now...what network protcols are turned on for each PC? Appletalk? TCPIP...? What about on the server?
 
The building is set up with two wire closets connected via 100 mb fiber. The main closet goes to our main switches accros the river via fiber. The switches are all 10/100. We have some old Cajuns (switches) that are not so great.. but i just picked up some 48 port hp unmanaged switches to try to phase out the old ones. The sad thing is they only have two gig ports on them.

On the Client Macs we have enabled:

Bonjor, Appletalk, and LDAPv3 some may have SMB enabled.

The server has Bonjor, Appletalk, and LDAPv3 enabled. The services i have running are AFP, DHCP, DNS, and Open Directory.

Would setting up a link aggragate be worth it?
 
Sounds more like a network issue than server. Sporadic slow logons to a single server are usually indicative of high volumes of network traffic which will slow things down considerably.

If you want to manage system preferences and dock settings it is more effective to modify the relevant plist files on the install image for the clients than have them pulled across the netwrok everytime someone logs in. Windows roaming profiles anyone :)
 
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