Setting up a domain controller takes a long time

[Pete]

Hi,
I'm in the process of setting up a domain controller but it's taking a very
long time. It only took a few minutes before it said it was finished then
asked for a reboot but it hasn't shared out the sysvol folder yet. It's
still copying data into the sysvol folder but it's just very slow. There's
about 2Gb of data in the sysvol share on the other domain controllers we
have. I can copy a 2Gb of data to the new domain controller by drag and drop
in about 15minutes but at the rate it's going it will take about a day and a
half until it's finished doing whatever it's doing.

We have a pretty fast network and I know it's not the network speed that's
causing the delay.

Should it really take this long to set up a domain controller? The others
didn't take very long but then they were set up when there were very few
users on the network.

Thanks
Pete

 

[John LeMay]

We have a pretty fast network and I know it's not the network speed that's
causing the delay.

Could it perhaps be that your adapter has incorrectly negotiated it's
speed? If the card is connected to a switch and autonegotiated at 100hdx
you could be getting a LOT of bad things (runts and late collisions for
example) that would cause a scenario like you describe.

Try hard-coding the network adapter to a proper speed. 100fdx would
obviously be best if your network supports it.

--
John LeMay
kc2kth
Senior Technical Manager
NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-557-4848
Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions

 

[Pete]

Thanks John but this was definitely not the problem. The network speed on
the port and the server were both hard coded to 100/full (I've had dealings
with network port speed on cards and switches before so it's something I
always look at).

The server has at last made itself a domain controller and shared out
sysvol. What I had to do was described in the event log. See the following
message. I increased the size to 3 times what was listed and now it is
working. It's strange that there is only 1 such event in the event log and
that wasn't until 9pm last night (over a day since it started it's attempt
to become a domain controller!). Thanks anyway.

Pete.

The File Replication Service paused because the staging area is full.
Replication will resume if staging space becomes available or if the staging
space limit is increased.


The current value of the staging space limit is 675840 KB.


To change the staging space limit, run regedit.


Click on Start, Run and type regedit.


Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, Services, NtFrs,
Parameters, and the value "Staging Space Limit in KB".