Hello.. My network at school has just had the main server upgraded from NT4 to 2003 by contractors. Before the upgrade the network used NT4 and operated really good. Now the network (50 NT4 plus 50 XP Pro machines) is really slow and it takes 6 minutes for pupils to logon. Looking at the switches indicates lots of traffic. Why would the network slow down. A new HP server replaced the old dell server. I think the contracters bodged the job up.....any ideas

(are u using dhcp, if so) check the settings on the server? it needs more than to just assign the a workstation ip addresses, tell the dhcp to tell workstations about: the ip-address of the dns server.and also any routers(default gateways)

have they upgraded any of the switches?, (if any of the switches have ip addresses also class them as defualt gateways, thats if the are on the route the data takes to get to the server).

if the workstation isnt told where the server is by the dhcp it will take a long time to logon and also they will create alot of ARP and rarp requests which again will slow the network even more. i made the same mistake,

hope this helps

Thanks , thats helpful..A friend says that it sounds like the pupils profiles have been knacked during the migration. He recommends creating a new account without any profile or logon on script. Then check how long that takes to logon.

thanks John

It sounds like a DNS issue. When I first started experimenting with Windows 2000 Server, I learned that the clients needed to be issued the IP address of the Windows 2000 server as their primary DNS IP address for logins to execute quickly. Otherwise logins could take anywhere from 3-7 minutes.

Do you work for this school or are you a student?

I work for the school as the Network Administrator (that's a laugh) but have no knowledge of 2003, but I will check that that info on the DNS.

I take it that means that I need to go around all the machines and set up the DNS.

Thanks John

Oops...got that wrong..I just found out that the DHCP needs the DNS server IP address setting. I will check that tomorrow. But I would have thought that the contractors would have done that...Thanks John

What school is this? Please post your results as I am curious to see if this problem continued into Windows Server 2003.

I entered the DNS settings on the XP Pro machines to point to the server. Then checked that the DHCP had its DNS settings pointing to itself.
Still the logon time was about 7-10 minutes..

I then created a new user with no profile or logon scripts and this logon was 45 seconds.

So I am still stuck with a slow network

These guys will sort it for you. www.sycom.net
They look after our local infant/Junior School in Berkshire UK. It took us an age to find a company that knew what they were doing, and I thank god we have found these guys. Most issues they tell me are DNS related.
St Teresa Catholic School, Berkshire