"Applying your personal settings" - long time

[Charliesz]

Hi Gang.

I have couple of clean WinXP Pro clients hooked up to domain on Win2k3 server. By clean, i mean freshly installed OSes.

When logging in on either of the clients , i get the "Applying your personal settings" for around 5 minutes!!
These are different machines, no software installed just yet , they are fresh!
Ive made sure the username thats used to log in is local administrator on each of the machines.

On the server, usernames are only members of "Domain Users" and "Custom group" which has nothing in it (for sharing purposes)


What am i missing here? Why does it take so long for the machines to "apply settings". Im sure it something on the server.

Thanks.

 

[Charliesz]

Ive somewhat found the solution. Apparently since i have all the machines (including server) going through a router , router interferes with DNS queries that of a server.

So, ive set manually DNS entries in TCP/IP setting on each of the client machines to point to the Server. Now all the clients load up right off the bat.


However, what if say i have a laptop?
Person owning it has to travel to different places , so that static DNS entry will be a problem.

Is there another way ?

 

[mlichstein]

Clients on an Active Directory domain should always point to the domain controllers for DNS. They shouldn't be configured to use any other IP for DNS, even as a secondary.

You can put the router's IP (or your ISPs DNS servers) in the forwarders tab of your DNS server.

 

[Charliesz]

Just wondering whether this will work:

Ive changed router DNS to point to my server IP address. In DNS settings on the server , ive put in the 2 DNS (from ISP) entries in the forwarders tab.

That actually works, and clients are not required to be set with a static DNS. AND that "applying your personal settings" is not a problems either.

However, now when clients are trying to surf off to the web, it takes around 3-5 seconds before the name is resolved(ie. google.com , msn.com , etc.).

Just wondering if i could adjust some DNS settings which might speedup the process. Myself, i could not find anythign of such sort.

Any help is appreciated

note: Im doing all that to avoid setting up DHCP on the server computer.

 

[WillShakespeare]

Why avoid DHCP? If you let the laptop use DHCP to set the DNS, then when away from the office, there is no static entry, and he wouldn't have problems.
At least that's how we do it here, and our laptops work fine in and out of the network.

Will

 

[Charliesz]

Ouh yes. But i let my router do the DHCP work instead

 

[NickFerrar]

Not sure how many clients you have but if it's a large enough network for you to have AD running then personally I'd say do DHCP through Windows as well rather than rely on a router that has to be harder to configure and monitor.