Windows 8 and DSfW
I am still in the process of using Windows 8 with Domain Services for Windows. From what I have seen so far it behaves similar to Windows 7 as a workstation joined to the domain. Logging in, mapping drives, running GPOs, executing login script from a GPO, all seem to work as in Windows 7. The biggest challenge for me is getting used to the Start menu in Windows 8 and that isn’t DSfW related.
Windows 8 with VMWare View 5.1.1 and DSfW OES11SP1 all appear to play well with each other. Making templates and linked clones do not seem to have any gotchyas to look out for. Let me know or the Novell Forums know if you discover a bug with DSfW and Windows 8.
Troubleshooting slow logins and unresponsive DSfW servers
I have seen several issues were a DSfW server becomes sluggish or unresponsive. Logins can take several minutes. Some times ndsd or another DSfW process crashes.
If a DSfW server running DNS has a DSfW specific process stop or crash a quick stop gap measure is to monitor the DSfW processes and restart them if one or more of the DSfW processes stop. I created a simple script that will check that a pid exists for each process. The script is called dsfw_processchk.sh. While it does not restart DSfW in every condition like if a process continues to run but is not responding or say a process crashes but the pid is never cleaned up, it does work for most situations. Create a cron job to run the script every hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes, what ever you desire. My… Continue reading
How to Join a workstation to a DSfW domain
Joining a workstation to a DSfW domain is the same as joining to an AD domain.
Be sure the workstation’s time is insync with the server and can resolve the domain with nslookup