Login Script Hell

[brianc123]

Greetings,

I live in The Bahamas. We have alot of power outages.
I have about 200 workstations that use the Intel 82541EI Gigabit
onboard.
The problem I am having, is, when we have a power outage, and the power
comes back on, I have 200 clients coming back online, and all get these
following DHCP errors (in this order)

1.
Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from
the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address
000D60B59FCA. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. Your computer will continue
to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP)
server.

2.
Your computer has detected that the IP address 0.0.0.0 for the Network
Card with network address 000D60B59FCA is already in use on the
network. Your computer will automatically attempt to obtain a different
address.

3.
Your computer has detected that the IP address 192.168.0.69 for the
Network Card with network address 000D60B59FCA is already in use on the
network. Your computer will automatically attempt to obtain a different
address.

The IP in event 3 is the actual IP that was leased before the power
outage.

My main problem is, even with the Wait for Network policy in place, if
the users try to log in immediately, the login script is not processed,
because the machine has not obtained an IP yet.

No, none of the computers have UPS connected, as yet, but I think I
will be going this route anyway, and I am sure this will alleviate this
annoying problem. Also, I would rather not use Reservations.

Until then, can anyone think of a workaround?
I've tried:
- All available BIOS for the workstations (8183-36U Netvista S50s).
- All available Intel drivers.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Greetings,

I live in The Bahamas. We have alot of power outages.
I have about 200 workstations that use the Intel 82541EI Gigabit
onboard.
The problem I am having, is, when we have a power outage, and the power
comes back on, I have 200 clients coming back online, and all get these
following DHCP errors (in this order)

1.
Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from
the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address
000D60B59FCA. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. Your computer will continue
to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP)
server.

2.
Your computer has detected that the IP address 0.0.0.0 for the Network
Card with network address 000D60B59FCA is already in use on the
network. Your computer will automatically attempt to obtain a different
address.

3.
Your computer has detected that the IP address 192.168.0.69 for the
Network Card with network address 000D60B59FCA is already in use on the
network. Your computer will automatically attempt to obtain a different
address.

The IP in event 3 is the actual IP that was leased before the power
outage.

My main problem is, even with the Wait for Network policy in place, if
the users try to log in immediately, the login script is not processed,
because the machine has not obtained an IP yet.

No, none of the computers have UPS connected, as yet, but I think I
will be going this route anyway, and I am sure this will alleviate this
annoying problem. Also, I would rather not use Reservations.

Until then, can anyone think of a workaround?
I've tried:
- All available BIOS for the workstations (8183-36U Netvista S50s).
- All available Intel drivers.

Any help is appreciated.

200 PCs is not a large number. I would use fixed IP addresses
and link them to the NetBIOS names, e.g. like so:

PC150 192.168.0.150
PC31 192.168.0.31

Using netsh.exe, you can assign the IP addresses from
your console.

 

[brianc123]

Thanks for your response..

Yeah, I guess that's my only real alternative.
Most of the time I try to fix the problem instead of avoiding it, but
now it is just too annoying.

 

[Hajo Ehlers]

Thanks for your response..

Yeah, I guess that's my only real alternative.

Not using reservations on the DHCP server but settting but IP numbers
on each client ?
I would go for reservation and leave a few IP number for guest
machines.

hth
Hajo

 

[brianc123]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your ideas, but I found out what was causing the problem.
Turns out, the Cisco Catalyst switches I use (WS-C3548-XL) come with
Spanning Tree enabled by default.

After I disabled it on the switches, the DHCP problems at the
workstations disappeared.
I guess sooner or later I will look into properly configuring STP.