Slow Opening of Office 2007 Documents From a Network Drive

In one of my recent SBS 2008 migrations a user complained that Word and Excel documents could take up to several minutes for the documents to open from a network drive mapped to a DFS share. His laptop was the only Windows Vista machine on the local network at the time.

My initial thought was that IPv6 lookups were stalling the opening of the documents, so I got the user to disable IPv6 according to MSKB 929852. This didn't work.

I remoted in to his laptop and had a look. I got varying load times, from 15 seconds to several minutes irrespective of file size.

I reverted to my old debugging method - opening the file in Notepad. Instant. Every time.

OK, must be a dodgy hotfix. None installed since the problem exhibited itself. OK, someone out in the Intarweb must have experienced this. My Google-fu isn't too bad, but I couldn't find anyone with the exact same problem. This TechArea post on slow DFS access was the reverse to what I was seeing, so I changed the NetBIOS reference (e.g. \\DOMAIN\DFS\Share) to a FQDN reference (\\corp.domain.com\DFS\Share).

Bingo - load times were back to normal!

I've now got a note to migrate all my DFS references from using the NetBIOS name to using the FQDN name prior to any Windows Server 2008 migrations.

Machine Account Passwords and Active Directory

If you've ever wondered how machine account passwords work and haven't been able to find a clear description and process in amongst all the different Knowledge Base articles and TechNet documentation, then I'd highly recommend reading the Ask Directory Services Team blog article on this very subject. It's clear, concise and well written.

I'd also recommend you add this blog to your RSS reader for anything AD related.

Failure in "the Cloud" for Some Australians

 

The Primus Data Centre in Melbourne lost power earlier today - around 2pm AEDT. No big deal you say, it's got UPSes and gensets. What's the problem?

The problem is that either the gensets or UPSes failed big time. It's now 6pm AEDT and the data centre is still having power issues. Thanks to Internode via their network status page and PIPE Networks via their CEO Bevan posting a status report at Whirlpool for letting us know what's going on.

The even bigger problem is the number of customers affected. Netspace - an ISP - were down nationally for around an hour. A number of hosting companies are still down, and a number of ISPs servicing Tasmania transit through this data centre, so their Tasmanian customers are isolated from the Internet.

It's understandable that the data centre lost power, given the recent heat wave in Victoria and the associated infrastructure problems (power, rail) that has caused. It's also understandable that UPSes - even arrays - fail, as do generators. What's not understandable is the number of hosting companies and ISPs that don't provide redundancy for their own infrastructure. Assuming that a data centre is always going to be up and running is a really bad assumption.

The simplest form of redundancy is having an offsite DNS server. That way you can at least respond to DNS queries and gives you options for swinging in temporary services at short notice to explain to customers what is going on. The same can be done for mail using offsite MX and some offsite Web presence, especially for support services.

So if you're expecting 24x7 from a hosting provider, you probably need to ask them how many data centres they're running on and how much redundancy across data centres there is. Even a data centre is a point of failure.