Slow Network login - Win2k and Netware

[cyberhh]

At several sites all my Windows 2000 users are expieriencing similiar network speed issues:

All - Windows 2000 SP3
NetWare client 4.83e SP1

When they click on "My Computer" it takes 10-15 seconds to show the drives, when they pull down the list of drives in any office program to open or save a file it can take as much a 30 seconds to show thie list and login times after the passwords are entered can be up to 3 minutes. Any tips you can offer would be much appreciated.
Thanks

[NooNoo]

Try this

certified by novell!

[Cleetus]

Or what we did that worked, that I didn't see in those articles is the following.

Go to the properties of the Netware client.

Click on Advanced settings tab

Turn File Cacheing to off

Then reboot

Worked like a charm for us, as far as the system taking forever to save MS Office things.

[KD]

Try changing the Protocol preferences in Novell client and what protocols are bound to your clients. It was explained to me that if you have Novell Client setup to use both TCP/IP and IPX/SPX that it will try both protocols for communication and even though it gets an answer with one it will wait for the other to time out before continuing.

On our network we had the same slow connections that you described. We are running Novell 4.11 and have a Windows NT 4.0 domain. Since Novell 4.11 only runs IPX we did a custom install of the Novell client choosing IPX as the only protocol to install. You can check what protocols your client is using by going into the properties of Novell client and clicking on the Protocol Preferences tab. If you have both IPX and IP and only want to use IPX choose it as your prefered network protocol. Then select IP and uncheck all of it's protocol component settings. Obviously if you are running Novell 5 or greater on IP then you want to select IP only.

As for the bindings you can change them by right clicking on My Network Places and choosing properties. From there select advanced settings from the advanced menu. Remove any unneccesary protocols from the clients. In our case we know that Novell Client for Windows 2000 will never use TCP/IP on our network so we have unchecked that protocol.

Hope this helps!

[cyberhh]

Thanks for all the tips and please keep them coming.

[MacGyver]

Just out of curiousity, what happens if you un-map all the network drives and use UNC paths to browse the network instead? Does it still drag?

[cyberhh]

If I use the UNC it is MUCh slower - up to three minutes to respond to a click.