ghelbig@lycos.com wrote:
> I have 2 samba servers. I have a bunch of clients, most of them
> Win2K.
>
> The problem is the performance; it's very, very slow, -except-
>
> There's a Win95 box that goes pretty well. And another Win2K box
> that's been "off the net" for a while, so is missing about 2 years of
> updates and fixes.
>
> This Win2K box that doesn't have the last 2 years of updates is way
> faster than all the other Win2K machines.
>
> Has anyone else seen this? Any idea which "fix" breaks it?

Unsure. But your Win9x box is a member of a "Workgroup", and your Win2K
boxes may be members of a "Domain". That can make for interesting
performance issues.

Alternatively, your Win2K boxes are all spyware loaded botnet zombies,
except for the one that's been "off the net". And is there any reason to
stick with Win2K instead of XP?

All the computers are members of the same workgroup. I don't use
domains.

The Win2K boxes are reasonably clean. I run AVG and AdAware on all the
clients regularly, and did a full test just today.

There are plenty of reasons to not "upgrade" to Win-XP. But I did try
an XP client, and the performance is no better than the slow Win2K
client.

I've also been able to duplicate the trouble with a fresh install.
Once all the updates are installed, it starts to crawl. With just SP4,
and -no- other updates, the performance is pretty good: 5 to 10x faster
than after the rest of the security fixes are applied.

wrote in message
news:1144186656.248025.319190@t31g2000cwb.googlegr oups.com...
> All the computers are members of the same workgroup. I don't use
> domains.
>
> The Win2K boxes are reasonably clean. I run AVG and AdAware on all the
> clients regularly, and did a full test just today.
>
> There are plenty of reasons to not "upgrade" to Win-XP. But I did try
> an XP client, and the performance is no better than the slow Win2K
> client.
>
> I've also been able to duplicate the trouble with a fresh install.
> Once all the updates are installed, it starts to crawl. With just SP4,
> and -no- other updates, the performance is pretty good: 5 to 10x faster
> than after the rest of the security fixes are applied.
>

I guess "security" does not come for free. For example, for those who have
used IPSEC where each packet is encrypted, there is a huge performance
penalty. Another example is that I recently installed the lastest Vista
beta, CTP build 5308 which came out Feb 2006. When running at the strictest
security, it's extremely slow. When I dropped it to "medium" security, there
is a very noticeable performance improvement.

Hi

Can you read event log on slow workstation ?
Any problem with master browser and election ?
rds

Nothing of note in the event log. I can browse, it's just real slow.

The "security" patches have little to do with network security. MS has
started calling every bug fix a security patch. "A security issue has
been found with the frambulator .... "

I'm wondering if it's just one patch, or an interaction between
several. There's a dozen or so since SP4.

Try Sniffer Pro or EtheReal for monitoring network

Can you check out your switches ?

100Mb/s or 1Gb/s, all your network adaptator are on Auto / Full / Half
, may be may be

RDS

wrote in message
news:1144112017.289602.225490@u72g2000cwu.googlegr oups.com...
>I have 2 samba servers. I have a bunch of clients, most of them Win2K.
>
> The problem is the performance; it's very, very slow, -except-
>
> There's a Win95 box that goes pretty well. And another Win2K box
> that's been "off the net" for a while, so is missing about 2 years of
> updates and fixes.
>
> This Win2K box that doesn't have the last 2 years of updates is way
> faster than all the other Win2K machines.
>
> Has anyone else seen this? Any idea which "fix" breaks it?
>

We had a problem with WinXP in AD. It turned out to be the shortcuts in the
network neighborhood. See here: http://www.ss64.com/nt/slow_browsing.html

It's unrelated to the domain or workgroup. Perhaps one of the updates added
this slow browsing feature to Win2000 also. There are lots of work arounds
as noted.

Cesar Neri wrote:
>
> wrote in message
> news:1144186656.248025.319190@t31g2000cwb.googlegr oups.com...
> > All the computers are members of the same workgroup. I don't use
> > domains.
> >
> > The Win2K boxes are reasonably clean. I run AVG and AdAware on all the
> > clients regularly, and did a full test just today.
> >
> > There are plenty of reasons to not "upgrade" to Win-XP. But I did try
> > an XP client, and the performance is no better than the slow Win2K
> > client.
> >
> > I've also been able to duplicate the trouble with a fresh install.
> > Once all the updates are installed, it starts to crawl. With just SP4,
> > and -no- other updates, the performance is pretty good: 5 to 10x faster
> > than after the rest of the security fixes are applied.
> >
>
> I guess "security" does not come for free. For example, for those who have
> used IPSEC where each packet is encrypted, there is a huge performance
> penalty. Another example is that I recently installed the lastest Vista
> beta, CTP build 5308 which came out Feb 2006. When running at the strictest
> security, it's extremely slow. When I dropped it to "medium" security, there
> is a very noticeable performance improvement.

I think "security" is becoming more and more commercially
exploited. Yes, maybe I'm trolling here, but I think it's
idiotic to upgrade any Windows release even to SP4. Is there any
way to really know what one is fixing by installing SP1? Or SP2?
Or SP3? Or SP4? Right. One doesn't. Suppose Bill comes with
SP11. Madness.

All my clients have a clean XP. No SP's. The're behind a
firewall which takes care of unsollicited traffic (and there is
a lot of that!). My users cannot serve anything, and they don't
even notice.
The only thing I have to worry about is viruses. So the only
"service release" I do on my clients is the installation of a
good virus scanner.

Daniel

I'll have to disgree there - updates which fix holes are 'a good
thing'. Now, an example.

Remember that SQL worm a few years back? The one which used the fact
that MS SQL server was running unnoticed on most unpatched machines
with the default password and a security hole? The one which generated
so much traffic on the net, the net pretty much ground to a halt for a
few hours?

Well, I know a very large company which was behind firewalls and was
unaffected. Lucky them.
A couple of days later, someone high up in the company brought his
laptop in to work and hooked it up to the company's internal network.
BLAM. Someone lower down the food chain would have been it trouble for
that, this guy was safe.

Vlad_Inhaler wrote:
> I'll have to disgree there - updates which fix holes are 'a good
> thing'. Now, an example.



I'm not saying fixes are bad either. What *is* bad is that there is no
clue as to what is actually being fixed, and what the side effects are.

If I had either piece of data, my current task would be much less
challenging.

ghelbig@lycos.com wrote:
>
> Vlad_Inhaler wrote:
> > I'll have to disgree there - updates which fix holes are 'a good
> > thing'. Now, an example.
>
>
>
> I'm not saying fixes are bad either. What *is* bad is that there is no
> clue as to what is actually being fixed, and what the side effects are.
>
> If I had either piece of data, my current task would be much less
> challenging.

I assume that your original post was about the slowness of the
network connection. Often, this is a DNS problem.

In the old windows clients (Win9x) this was never a problem. XP
and 200x are really NT, and NT has very strict rules with SMB
(NetBIOS) connections.

Check the WINS and DNS configurations on your *clients*. Don't
let WINS use the LMHOSTS file and make sure that your client
names are part of your domain name.

Can you ping your clients by name?

That's not the problem at all. The problem is that the Win2K client
SMB stack gets smacked when all of the service packs are installed.

I can FTP to them by name. Matter of fact, if I create an FTP entry
for the host in the client's Network Neighborhood (by name), I can
read/write at almost wire rates.

So there's no problem with the connection or name resolution.