Login Scripts

[grimmy]

Hello,
Here is a problem and nobody I have asked knows the answer even instructors with all the microsoft quals etc.
In our domain we have a PDC at head office and BDC's at our sites around the country.
Obviously this is so all clients on each site would use their own BDC to logon hence login time would be far quicker than all going down to head office all the time.
The problem is that when users log into the clients at our site it uses a BDC from a site about 200 miles away, how can it find this one first.
We have tried playing with the node type of the BDC but this has not changed. Also we were told it might be the order that the BDC's are setup in the DNS server and it will pick the first in the list, but this has been proved to be false.
We know that it uses the first BDC the clients find but how on earth can it find a BDC a couple of hundred miles away instead of the one on site.
This is a problem because as you probably have worked out login times are very slow and you know what users are like for moaning.

Thanks.....Grimmy

 

[SteelDragon]

Try setting up your local servers and network on a different subnet, then use your server as a router to connect you to the rest of the network. Your users will then be forced to ONLY log on to your BDC, and with routing enabled you should be able to see the rest of the company and network no sweat(just don't forget to setup a good routing table). Your Wan Access should not be slowed, but your server use will increase a bit, but it should not impact your performace very much if you have a decent server. Subnetting should be the way to go in these types of situations, and if you already have a router setup anyhow, this makes life even easier, as you will not have to use the router function in NT on your server.

Hope this helps,

Good Luck,
SteelDragon

 

[MaestroG]

SteelDragon is right on, but to answer your question, grimmy, it is finding that BDC 200 miles away first because that is the first BDC to respond to the "all hail" from your computers for a logon server. It may just be that the local BDC is a little bogged down. It takes CPU and resources to be a DC servicing logon requests. I would bet if you upgraded the RAM in this local BDC and up'd it's pagefile, did a defragmentation (DiskKeeper or similar), did a pagefile & registry defrag with pagedefrag.exe from sysinternals.com, cleaned up the hard-drive(s), did a reconcile on the DHCP Scope and initiated scavenging (in off hours) on WINS, possibly move some applications that run from the BDC to another server, and finally re-applied SP6a, your BDC would run MUCH better and would probably win the race to answering your computer's logon requests.

It's just a suggestion, but it probably wouldn't hurt now, would it! ;-)

Have fun,
MaestroG B-)

 

[peterve]

There is a tool in the NT 4 resource kit to set a preferred DC...
-> setprfdc.exe
After logging on once to the DC, normally the client will remember the last logon server... Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be

 

[peterve]

I'm sorry, you won't find it in the resource kit, but if you need it, I can send it to you... Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be

 

[peterve]

Also, you might want to check out

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/kb.asp?ID=167029

Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be

 

[MaestroG]

I'd like a copy of it, Peter.

Thanks!
MaestroG

maestrogee@hotmail.com

 

[peterve]

An alternative approach procedure: Add the following line to the file \WinNT\system32\drivers\etc\LMHOSTS on NT workstation. Start the line with the IP of the DC you want to force a logon to followed by the name of the domain & "n" spaces & \0x1C in quotes so that (domain name) + (spaces) = 15. Follow this by #PRE. If the target DC is at 172.77.71.9 and the domain is "ACME" the line should look like this:


172.77.71.9 "ACME \0x1C" #PRE

Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be