Why does the Novell Client Slow Down Network Access?

[houseisland]

Why does the Novell client in a mixed NT/W2K/Novell environment slow down access/reponse time to network resources? And more importantly what tweaking can be done to improve things?

If one installs the Microsoft client for Novell, things are very speedy, but there is no access to many of the very convenient admin tools that come with the Novell client.

[MacGyver]

Sounds like the Netware client is causing the computer to "hunt" for something that the MS client wouldn't. What options did you use to install the client, and have you tried this with a clean install to see if it makes any difference? What version of server do you have, and did you update to W2K SP2?

[condor]

what protocols are you using ?

make sure you are installing only those you need (preferably ONE)

also make sure you uninstall any psrt you don't need and disable the computer browser..

I can't really offer more insight without knowing more onformation on your systems..

I'm not running a netware network but from past experiences I never noticed any problems like you mention..

[houseisland]

Thanks.

I am not going to have time to provide an adequate reply to your questions for a bit here.

More in a couple of days.

[CptCaveman]

I have notice the same problems with our network as well. I only have two win2k machines and about 8 win98 machines on a netware 5 server. The 2 win2k machines are extremly slow getting on the network and seeing the server and the printers. Has for the win98 machine I have no problems. I am only using tcp/ip and have it all on a 100 mbs switch. Any Sugestions or other questions?

[CptCaveman]

forgot to say that both win2k machines are clean installs and one with sp1 and the other with sp2 still same problems.

[Sandman72]

did you actually install client or did you just install NWLink.

[CptCaveman]

I have the win200/nt client from novell install on both systems.

[dprchic]

Have the same problem on my network. Put a call into Novell for it. Turns out Novell was able to duplicate the problem without the Novell client installed. It appears to be a Win2k issue. Novell ran traces during the login process and found that Win2k was doing some "strange" things during the login process. At that time, they had referred the problem to engineering, to see if they could come up with something. Hope this helps.

[dprchic]

Have the same problem on my network. Put a call into Novell for it. Turns out Novell was able to duplicate the problem without the Novell client installed. It appears to be a Win2k issue. Novell ran traces during the login process and found that Win2k was doing some "strange" things during the login process. At that time, they had referred the problem to engineering, to see if they could come up with something. Hope this helps.

[NYCTSMichelle]

Originally posted by houseisland:
<STRONG>Why does the Novell client in a mixed NT/W2K/Novell environment slow down access/reponse time to network resources? And more importantly what tweaking can be done to improve things?</STRONG>

Be sure that on the advanced settings side you turn LOCAL CACHING -- OFF -- and COMMIT -- ON -- which, at least for the NW 4.8 client is the reverse of the default install. Also, be sure to turn off all journaling in any e-mail software, unless you absolutely need it, as this keeps running in the background _EVEN IF_ say, your MS Outlook is NOT running!!! Upgrades from older versions take prior versions settings, so... if you never paid attention to this before, do so now. Last but not least, check your virus scanning software, especially that which is running on the server. If you've got McAfee going, and you haven't set it for ALL FILES (not some of this, some of that), it will slow down saves on everything. This seems counterintuitive, BUT... it's a documented bug on the McAfee site & as of 6 weeks ago, they were working on it. Haven't revisited issue since then.

How do I know this works? well, on my little itty bitty church network, it was taking FOREVER to save the bulletin... did some digging and the above was what I found, and now all is speedy again.

HTH, good luck!

Giselle

[kannibul]

Where I work, we have the same setup
We have 9x on the desktops, 2000 for servers, novell 5, and my desktop os a 2000 pro
with my machine, If I type \\novell
it takes a good 3 minutes to connect.
Microsoft has a KB article about this problem, but I haven't gotten the fix becuase I don't want to have to pay for it.
anyway, what it says is tha tit is looking for "scheduled tasks" and "printers" as if you are browsing a MS server.
until this times out, it will continue to search, locking explorer in the process until it has timed out.
I have found a work around:
net use
by mapping a drive letter to the share, it will do the search once and then allow you to connect.
if you do another browse, it will do the timeouts, but if you map a root share, you won't have to worry about it.