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Synchronising messages... why?

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by the clam

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Hi,

I'm in charge of a school network which has several suites of Win2k machines. Fairly recently, some of the machines started coming up with annoying Synchronising messages, which don't seem to go away for rather a long time.

Now while these messages are up, the programs menu and user area (home drive) are not available, which is clearly very annoying.

Thinking it was a network problem, I upgraded the main backbone to a gig and threw more switches at the individual labs, however despite each lab having about 4x the bandwidth they had before, the synchronisation messages do not seem to have improved at all.

The main server is a 4 x 2 gig Xeon job with a gig of RAM and its processor usage doesn't seem to be peaking at all, and the 5 disk RAID seems quite happily turning out data without a struggle.

Any ideas?

Cheers!

3 replies

by ewgny

Are you using roaming profiles ? I have seen roaming profiles as large as 1/2 GB. If you have a policy that deletes locally cached profiles on the workstations, everytime a user logs on the full profile will be pulled. See who is logging on when the problem occurs, and then go to the Server and rip open their folders to see whats synchronizing.

by the clam

Thanks for the help, I hate to reject the answer but it won't let me comment otherwise. We do indeed use roaming profiles but from what I can tell checking the workstations they only get as big as 3 meg. The kids aren't allowed access to the desktop so nothing too big can get into the profiles. The profiles are cached indefinitely too, so in theory at least they won't be pulling too much over the network. Unfortunately it's not really possible to see who's logging on at the times it occurs since this is a school, so the start of every lesson brings a flood of logins from each of the 6 computer suites we have here, so isolating any one or small group of users would be impossible! The most annoying thing is that they don't immediately synchronise, and there's no way to force synch!

by ewgny

I think you should consider using a mandatory profile for the Students. I found that using a mandatory profile, scripting the needed printers, and using group policy to redirect the "My Documents" folder works well in a student environment. The redirected My documents folder is then available on any pc they log on to. Set up Disk Quotas on the partition that you redirect the "My Document folder" to. This strategy should give the students the function that they need, minimize network traffic, simplify backup and give you storage control.

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