Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group January 17, 2001

Attendees:

Regrets:

Submitted items:

Q: (Nevil) Logon problems since the beginning of term

• Clean accounts hang (not all accounts, not all machines, doesn't work then does).
• existing accounts hang during logon (watstar n: drive has partial n:\w95 remove and it works).
• 486 machines get please waits...... sometimes/most times.

A: (Jim) I have seen the same effect too, as well users are not getitng the Mathcad 2000 (whether this is related). Login times seem to have skyrocketed.

(Steph) Have you noticed this in islands or pockets of your network, indicating workstation or switch settings? As for the increase in login times, have you checked the settings of Norton AntiVirus (NAV) to see how it is set in the problem machine/user accounts?
(Ray) NAV is set for scanning files on created or downloaded, not every file scan on run or open. We are assuming that Sysctl is scanning all machines at night and flagging problems.
(Jim) I have also seen the login hanging at the WinLogo with the hour glass icon.
(Ray) This is the Windows taskman process.
(Erick) That is Windows, at this time the process may be looking for Wins Server etc.
(Ray) Do you have a Wins Server on your local sub-net?
(Jim) We use to, but not now.
(Ray) It could be associated with the Master Browser, and wars happening with who is the master. On Sysctl there is a package Padder, which can be used to change the IP configuration.
(Nevil) We have noticed that the hanging type accounts have W95 on the watstar stub account drive. If we remove this, the accounts tend to work.
(Erick) Yes, this cand and does actually happen on logout. If the process detects the PWlogoff and PWboot files, it checks for an N: drive. The writing to disk can corrupt files, DOS, when full leaves tile handles open, Scandisk can fix this but a delete of the dirve does this also.
(Nevil) On our 486 machines we get the 'Please Wait' indicating network problems.
(Ray) Windows is going through Plug and Play at this time, and putting in a new network driver or over-writing the low memory area. Yes, when this happens, there are problems. How to get around? Upgrade to a better driver.
(Erick) I do appologize for teh Quota tool mishap. I had received feedback on the program earlier in November/December which indicated things were ok. It does seem to be fine in Windows 2000, but not in the real world of Polaris (W95) users.

Q: (Ray) Other beginning of term problems

• Quota tool
• Missing MS Visual Studio registry items.
• Missing Mathcad 2000 icon.
• Help not working in MS Visual Studio.

A: (Ray) The cause and effect of the first item was putting the Quota tool in, this could be a Winsock bug.
(Ray) With respect to the Mathcad icon, ScanDisk problems on J: drive, we had to go about fixing this manually. This should be ok now. The Bat file 'AddOff' can be run manually to get the new icons for those needing AddOff. The file got really big this time, since it does delete, and then puts the full program settings. It should only run once with the creation of 'Sysdll' in the windows directory as a marker. The N:\W95\Sysdll is a zero byte file.

(Ray) Visual Studio was working on random machines. With Visual Basic, if said 'Working Version' it had Registry keys missing. I re-did the SysAug on the first year labs. I then did a Jan2001 to check for the keys, if not there, then adds them. I have gone through several installation attempts. The MS knowledge base indicated there was a 1-3% error installing with certain DVD's. The newer disk seems to work locally, but after packaging, it does not work. There is a January update to fix this problem.
(Nevil) Is the other registry missing?
(Ray) Maybe, there were some redirects to Visual Studio, along with some Internet Explorer problems.
(Erick) The registry was written into blocks of 64k, and sometimes the writes do not go in correctly. The theory I have, is when two 64k blocks are used, errors can sometimes happen.
(Ray) There are growing problems with Windows 2000. The door opening for our Win2K lab happened too soon, and some things have not been working from the start. Erick has implemented a policy for the login screen which is working well, as is the Web Quota tool for Waterloo Polaris.
(Erick) Roaming Profiles are working, but it does need a helper machine since Windows 2000 requires a Samba connection for this implementation.
(Ray) This is due to encrypted passwords, Windows always sends encrypted (for roaming profiles) even if PlainText passwords is set in the registry. The server 'Hope' is an NFS mount to the NetApp, and exports this out to the Windows 2000 clients. It is just a Samba tweak to authenticate. The profile is the only thing that gets re-exported. See Mike Hurst for specifics on this.
(Erick) I will mail out the specifics for a Sun Ultra, this does not need to be high powered machine.
(Ray) Group policies and registry settings in which remove the profile off the local machine are also working. There still is problems with the C: root drive writes, which can be done (and left after the user logs off). This problem is limited with the use of quotas on the C: drive.

Information items:

(Ray) Norton AntiVirus is now running from a server, and it has found viruses on the Fine Arts Lab.

(Nevil) Yes, it even found them in the floppy drive.

(Ray) Printing works fine through Samba for Windows 2000. Accounting, the Web pages for administering, etc. have been successful too.

(Steph) Would it be possible to have some common registry/Bat file to simulate a type of 'Dept' command from the old watstar K: drives for the faculties software on the Q: drive?

(Ray) We can look into that. Arts does have a Q:\arts\utl\GetArts.bat which puts the icons on the desktop and in the 'Start Menu' (there is one there for the Language lab).

Created by: sempson@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca 2001/01/22
Revised by: sempson@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca 2001/01/25