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Why are machines slowing down after removing local server

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by charvell 2 views

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We transitioned our users network shares to a SAN, remapped printers to a different server, and disabled DHCP on their local server (we have helper routes in our router that direct their DHCP requests to a server in our data center). We've been operting like this for approximately 3 weeks. This is one of our remote branches, so we weren't able to get to the location to remove the server until recently. After removing the server, everyone end users PC is has slowed down very noticably. Things as seemingly simple as clicking on the start menu take 20-30 seconds to respond. All the machines have 2.2GHz processors or greater, and a minimum of 2GB of RAM. De-fragging the HDD has not solved the speed problem. Is there anything in removing that server physically that could be causing this that I am missing?

13 replies

by ---tk---

was the DHCP server also a Domain controller for that site?

by ---tk---

thats probably your problem. Even though they were back up domain controllers, each PC in the site was probably authenticating to them. Plus did you demote the BDC's properly?

I would put them back in, edit their log in script to add the printers and network shares and be done with it.

by kenone

Go in and clear out "Network Places" also disconnect any drive mappings to that server.

by charvell

All network drives are mapped to other servers, and I have deleted all shortcuts to network locations that were on the removed server. Or are you suggesting that I uncheck Automatically Search for Network Folders and Printers?

by brenton keegan

Check the application and system event logs to see what the computer is doing when it's slow. It will tell you if it's trying to hit the old server.

by charvell

XP Pro on all of them. Server OS is Windows Server 2003.

by kenone

Double click "My Network Places" look for any reference in that list to the old server, delete any you find & reboot.

by ---tk---

on some of the machines if they are Windows boxes I would try at the cmd prompt: ipconfig /flushdns then ipconfig /registerdns.

see if that helps

by charvell

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I've powered the server back up for the time being, we're going to have to look at demoting it again, probably through ntdsutil this time. I'll post another update once I've done this. Thanks again!

by charvell

The issue was some registry files looking for the decommissioned server were still remaining on users machines. Once I removed all references to the server from the registry, the machines instantly performed faster.

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