AD login slow

[cassupport]

I am in a Windows 2003 AD environment and our Mac labs (Tiger 10.4.10 -PPC and Intel mixed) authenticate first to AD for users and then to LDAP (10.4.10 PPC Server) for OSX settings. The interesting problem lately (last 10-12 months) has been that our faculty accounts login quickly while the student accounts can take 1+ minutes to login. I do know that there are several thousand less faculty accounts than students. Is there a way to either cache the AD user base locally or speed up the authentication search?

[cassupport]

I just was reminded that this problem has existed since we setup the labs, but we just thought it was due to AD problems occuring at the same time. We have also had network problems with both building that house the Mac labs and thus have never thought it was a “Mac” problem. Another note is that certain times the lab machines timeout before allowing a login, thus causing irritated users. Recently in a lab image setup and test, we noticed that as a faculty user (<1000 users) the login was quick, but as a student user (>10000) the login time was significant. ANY help on solving or reducing the login time for students would be greatly appreciated.

[cassupport]

I am using network home folders but that is done via applescript and .sh called by ldap after login, this is with the actual login. Does it matter that I have the AD plugin set to defaults for advanced options:
-Force local home directory on startup disk
-Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location, Network protocol to be used “SMB”
-Default user shell /bin/bash

Would it help to remove the check on the UNC path setting?

Thanks!

[Author]

Posts