Remote Desktop Login Hanging

thebman

Hi guys,

We have a few servers with windows server 2003 running on them.

Logins managed by active directory on a domain.

Whenever we login to the servers on the domain with the administrator login, they freeze at applying your settings for about 30 seconds or a couple of minutes at most.

In this time, CPU usage spikes as we get a warning by email when this occurs from a sensor.

We can't seem to find the cause of this issue. Tried using a different login with same permissions but same thing happens. Had a login with only access to a single folder and it happened to that one too.

Both these servers have a few websites running on them on the .net framework.

The servers were bought in the last year so they are more than powerful enough to run these websites because they were running more websites earlier so some have been shut down since.

Anyone have any ideas on what might be causing the problem?

preilly79

check the netlogon service is running, maybe give the service a restart. a lot of the time i've had suspended logins it's often due to the netlogon service having sh*t the bed.

thebman

I don't know if that would be it. Both servers have been restarted a couple of times since the problem first occurred for security updates with no change in behaviour.

I'll give it a try tomorrow though thanks. Any other suggestions?

preilly79

I don't suppose there's anything descriptive/indicative in Event Viewer that coincides with the logon time?

thebman

All I could see was app pools going a bit nuts but I think they were starved of resources by whatever is causing the problem.

I mean app pools are app pools, they should just work. You can't mess with them really. I tried setting them more regularly. The biggest app pool goes up to 200MB of usage which isn't that high I don't think. The servers have 8GB of memory each and maybe 2GB is in use by app pools when they are at their peak before they get recycled.

I can check for something else. There is a warning, something to do with a printer or printing service. I'll post it up tomorrow but not sure if it could cause this problem. I don't think it should. I'll check more in the event log tomorrow.

thebman

Hi update to this from event viewer.

In the DNS server event logs, I can see the following error:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: DNS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 4004
Date: 29/10/2008
Description:
The DNS server was unable to complete directory service enumeration of zone IJWEB.ie. This DNS server is configured to use information obtained from Active Directory for this zone and is unable to load the zone without it. Check that the Active Directory is functioning properly and repeat enumeration of the zone. The extended error debug information (which may be empty) is "". The event data contains the error.

preilly79

I think Netdiag.exe and DNSdiag.exe might be a good place to start then.

thebman

Neither of those commands will run.

netdiag is not a recognised command.

DNSdiag gives a isatq.dll not found error. I've reported this to the admins (work in Tech Support but they are buried in work) to see if they can help me out with why I can't find these DLL's.

From Googling it seems that DNSdiag is not shipped anymore on servers according to some guy on experts exchange. Don't know how correct that is.

Looked into why isatq.dll would be missing and apparently it only installs with some other IIS tools. Common tools are installed but it also said something about message service that needs to be installed. I checked what was installed for IIS. SMTP is installed but message queuing isn't.

I'll see what the admins have to say on if these should be installed. Thanks for your help on this so far. Might need help again after I talk to the admins.

preilly79

I think they're installed along with other tools from the suptools.msi on the OS installation CD. don't have one to hand to check unfortunately

FruitLover

thebman wrote: »

There is a warning, something to do with a printer or printing service.

This is a common warning with RDP sessions; from what I remember, it's because the server tries to install the remote client's printers (so you can use them directly from the server as though they were local). I wouldn't worry about it.

thebman wrote: »

Hi update to this from event viewer.

In the DNS server event logs, I can see the following error:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: DNS
...

Does this coincide timewise with the RDP logons? Might be a red herring.

Mightn't be a bad idea to have someone logged on at the console of one of these servers, monitoring the processes while someone tries to log on, to see if any process in particular spikes as they do.