domain logon slow on wireless

[tonymullen]

Hi, we have recently installed samba and it all works fine on our cabled network. We are using roaming profiles. Logging on is running at pretty quick speeds (no slower than my PC used to be logging on to Novell without roaming profiles).

We also have a wireless network that is running on a different subnet and is connected to the main network using a vpn tunnel. The delimiting factor here would be the 10Mbs cards in the VPN devices so I would expect some reduction in speed. However, logging on and off is REALLY slow - a lot more than ten times slower - the record being 2 hours on a PC that has a lot of data on it (it took around 3 or 4 minutes when cabled on the same PC).

I know it is roaming profiles causing the issue because setting the PC to local profiles only solves it. However this is not an acceptable solution for us and I am trying to find out why it would be so much slower.

Once logged in, response time is acceptable (opening files from network is fine and downloading a large file meets what I would expect - a little slower than wired but certainly useable and not ten times slower either - it takes aproximately one and a half to twice as long.

Anyone come accross this?

thanks in advance,

tony

 

[meekrob]

I would say you're expecting too much out of your wireless link. Ten megabits is the maximum you're going to get, with lots of latency and frame errors. Wireless is noisy, way more interference than ethernet. Which means a higher dropped packet rate, less speed. Add the overhead of a VPN and you've got a pretty slow link. My profile is 1.48G, think about how long it would take to encrypt decrypt all that data.

That being said I would try two things:

1) Make sure client side caching is enabled.

Explorer>Tools>Offline Files

Set to synchronize while logging on and off (Windows 2000 only has the first option). Make sure the cache size is big enough to accomodate the users profile and then some. The first time the user syncs up it will be slow (I would do the first sync over ethernet) ... but the next time shouldn't be too bad.

2) Decrease the size of the profile. Clean out all the junk, mp3s, sample videos etc...