strange latency issues with accessing OSX PDC with OD

hi all-

We migrated our network from an old NT box to our shiny X Serve prob. about a year ago. It was working fine, people authenticated against it.

We have roaming profiles setup, their home directory mounted (h: ) and on their desktop (2k and xp) their My Documents desktop alias is mapped to H:/Documents or something close.

We are currently having problems that seem to be latency authenticating against the machine (10.3.9 server). The probs. may be more sever on the win2k machines, as those users complain more than those on XP.. however engineering is on 2k, and sales is XP (!)

Symptoms (complaints ive heard!) seem are along these lines:

– when i open my computer, it takes a long time… 5-30 seconds. My best guess is that its slow to list the network drives or something to do with accessing our PDC/Fileserver named Austin (powers!).

– when im opening my mail it sometimes take 15 or so seconds to display the messages or sometimes it doesn’t show me i have new messages unless i click around or click on inbox our users are using current thunderbird, their thunderbird profile has their info saved in H:.

– i have personally seen some slow response times when i SSH to the server… when i ssh as my user (OD user), the delay can be a couple seconds to 15 seconds or so for the first time i try and ssh to the machine that day (not exactly sure what the important times are for when it will delay again next). If im opening a second ssh connection or i have just done it recently, it won’t take long. when i ssh as root (to test my theory only!) it seems to always popup the password prompt quickly. this is what makes me think its related to the auth part of things.

– on occasion, our windows users will get silly “The domain PREMIER is not available” messages when trying to login. most recently, we noticed that you cant login as short name anymore, must use full name… eg johnsmith instead of the “alias” john.

– not sure if this is related… sometimes our users seem to be disconnected from server, and some windows error about avail. to resync. One thunderbird user seems o loose his address book every now and then.. i dont -think- its thunderbird related.

– i am getting a packet or two of errors on my main managed switch, but mostly to an unused win98 machine, and not to any of the desktops that are complaining of problems.

– im starting to wonder if its DNS related somehow. We do run an internal DNS server for the desktops to use, and that just forwards the request off to our publicly avail. dns server. This runs on RH 7.2, which is also our DHCP server for which we statically assign IP’s via specifying the MAC and pointing that at a dns name. I’m not 100% comfortable with reverse dns… its at-least setup for some machines. should i be looking at this more?

we made sure we were not having any extra networking protocols installed on desktops, may have been slight improvement but not really.

main clues to me seem to be around trying to auth as root vs username and when laucnhing windows explorer it seems to sometimes lag for several seconds as if its trying to make sure or re-discover its “drives”.

oh, one user did make the comment that as if he disconnects “H:” he has less problems. not verified however.

two of us have searched around quite a bit, and the powers that be are giving us pressure. As a note, we were not always on romaing profiles, and had issues in the beginning but we seemed to work them out once we got the profile size down. we did change ip addressing schemes and i keep getting requests to change back to 192.168.255 from our now 10.1.x.x scheme.. i will eat my shorts if that ends up solving it.