AB's Useful Box - Windows Vista - slow logins to Windows Small Business Server (SBS)

Had a call from a small enterprise that had recently moved premises, and after moving the Windows Vista machines had become very slow during user logins to their local Windows Small Business Server (SBS). Very slow meaning the logins had gone from a little over a minute, to taking over five minutes and in some cases taking up to 20 minutes.

The problem to longer to diagnose that it really should have, so I thought it was worth sharing the solution in the hope it may help some else to not spend so much time working the same problem out, especially as there was almost nothing available via google.

First was to discover what had changed when the enterprise had relocated premises? They had all the same computers, same server that was hosting SBS, same network equipment, same internet router, and in many respects the same cabling. They were still using the same DHCP server, and same local IP Addresses.

It took some time to discover that the enterprise had changed their Internet Service Provider (ISP) during the relocation, but why should this have an effect the local area network that would result in significant delays in Windows Vista login to the SBS. It quite a bit more time to discover what else had changed during the ISP change over.

What was eventually discovered it that when the enterprise had changed ISP, the ISP had the office staff go into the configuration of all their machines and change the machines DNS Server entries. Originally the machines had a Primary and Secondary DNS Servers configured. The Primary was the that of the SBS Server, and the Secondary was of the ISPs DNS Server. What the ISP had the office staff do was to replace both the Primary and Seccond DNS addresses with two of the ISP DNS Server addresses.

What this would appear to have resulted in doing is that the WinVista machine were no longer resolve the name of their own local SBS Server, and were attempting to perform the lookups via the two ISP supplied DNS, which had no record of the local area network of the enterprise.

To correct the problem the DNS configuration of the WinVista machines was updated using the Advanced option which allows the configuration of three DNS Servers, first was the local DNS Server address, second and third was the ISP's DNS Server addresses. This then allowed the local WinVista machines to perform a local area network DNS lookup before attempting the lookup via the ISP.

As soon as the DNS configuration was updated, the WinVista logins to SBS went backup to their normal or previous login time of between one to two minutes.