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WAN Travelling User Problem

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by mike.brooks

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Here in the UK I am linked via a WAN to all our International sites. Each site has their own Exchange 5.5 server, here is my problem: -

A Laptop user from our Australian branch is currently moving about a bit internationally from site to site, his last visit to the uk lasted quiet a few weeks. His problem when connecting to our WAN are as follows: -

a) Email is slow: - his mailbox is still based on the Australian server, if he goes into Outlook an 'Connects' everything is slow.

b) 'Word' performance is awful, files are being directed to be saved on the Australian server.

In these sort of cases what are the best practises: -

Would it be best to move the mailbox across to the UK if he is working here for any length of time. Toimprove Outlook performance?

I am unsure about the MS 'Word' problem, her is a bit more background: -

On the Australian server for Users we have a personal directory defined in the AD as \\%logonserver%\xxxxxxx whereby xxxxxxx is the name of the person (and a network share - under a 'U:' drive.

On the UK server we have \\yyyyyyy\personal$\name

yyyyyy is the server name
personal$ the network share

Can anyone help me with some best practise advice in this situation.

5 replies

by abubin

You also did not mention what connection speed you are using.

First, try applying sp2. It does helps a bit on making the OS more stable.

Since you are not using Exchange2k, then you can't login through web-based exchange client which actually is faster. With exchange 5.5 and terminal services, your speed is as fast as your connection.

You might wanna try using terminal services which might improve performance.

I think your bottleneck lies in the WAN connection speed. With your currently setup, you depends a lot on 2 way communication between your 2 geographical area especially on the drive mapping part. But eliminating this would only open-up other problems. So, I would advice you to get a faster connection or try using Terminal services.

Oh..one last thing. Make sure the user is using Roaming profiles and that it is optimized. As you know, you can't place everything in that profile. Some of them need to be located locally to remove unneccessary transfer. You can read more about optimizing this in a lot of websites such as win2000mag.com or even some techrepublic articles.

Hope it helps.

by mike.brooks

This did not help me very much, but I am not getting a lot of answers elsewhere, I have worked out that perhaps my best way forward with 'Word' is to save the files locally.
I may move the mailbox to the UK.
I shall look into roaming profiles on the sites you mentioned.

by tpcosmo

I have the very same problem. What is happeneing according to a microsoft Tech Ne t article, is that the 2000 professional client wants to authenticate with the server it joined the domain with. I have a mobile user who experiences the same problemsyou are describing. Supposedly this was fixed with SP2, but not as far as my experience goes. I even have a couple of 2000 clients that ALWAYS authenticate thru a win 2000 server thats 40 miles away, even though there is an nt 4.0 DC in the very same building. MS suggests that the DC is cached in the registry and uses that DC to authenticate, and to fix it, you should try to turn off the netlogon service on the 2000 DC, and power up the 2000 client, and try to logon. When I did that the 2000 client wouldnt authenticate at all. I'm sorry I cant find the Tech Net article number, and I know this probably doesnt help, but I'm sure that there are others with the same problem. Any suggestions anyone?!?

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