Home Folder Mapping Failing on Wireless Clients

Trying to solve a complex and frustrating problem with home folder mappings for my school district and am stumped. Any help is appreciated.

I am doing basic home folder mapping in an Active Directory domain for users on the profile tab of their user account. We are mapping H to \\Server\Share$\User. Server is Windows Server 2008 R2 in a VMWare High Availability Cluster. Very vanilla method of doing this.

Our wireless users (HP laptops (staff) or Lenovo netbooks (students)) are booting up from their machine being off. Many times the home folder (H) is not mapped when the user logs in. Sometimes it does map and there is no pattern.

The staff and students map to two different shares on the same (virtual) server (and SAN). This happens during non peak hours too such as a Sunday afternoon when just a small handful of staff members are on the network so there is not a capacity or overload problem.

Usually if the user logs out and then right back in the drive will map fine. Sometimes it does not however.

The same students can login all day long to media center or lab computers (with an Ethernet connection) and never have an issue with a missing home folder. Staff members assigned a desktop never have a problem either.

The same image build of Windows 7 was deployed to both staff laptops and desktops and a similar image build of Windows 7 was deployed on both student laptops and desktops.

While staff have assigned machines and could be logging in with a cached profile, students roam between machines and usually do not have a cached profile.

Additionally, a simple batch script called on the same profile tab works flawlessly every time. (The batch file is a simple echo statement appending the date, time, user, and computer name to a text file located on a domain controller. It is an easy way to track a user rather than digging through security logs.)

Also a group policy user preference mapping two drives for staff or one drive for students works fine every time. Very frustrating...

The wireless network is a large infrastructure across the entire district and is new this year. While the laptops are new this year too, it would seems to point to a wireless issue. The vendor has suggested that UDP packets are being sent for the mapping and that they are being lost but I cannot see anyway to force TCP only as they are suggesting.

I think it would be helpful if I could do verbose logging of the logon process on the client laptops but my Winlogon event log is always empty. The old tried and true method (How to enable user environment debug logging in retail builds of Windows) was depreciated in Windows 7.

Any suggestions on how to enable verbose debugging during the login process on Windows 7?

Sorry for the complex and long winded problem. It is a rather frustrating issue in an environment of several thousand users where nobody has any idea and everyone is looking for me to resolve the issue. My days have been very long for the past three weeks.

How is the Home folder being mapped to each machine? Are you using group policy to run a batch file on logon that runs a script to map the share?

Edit:

I guess you probably aren't doing it this way because each user will have a different 'Home' folder.

Code:

 
net use H: \\Server\Share$\User

Here is the only thing I found as far as a verbose output when a computer is logging on:

Important

This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 322756 How to back up and restore the registry in Windows


Use Registry Editor to add or to modify the following registry entry: Subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Entry: UserEnvDebugLevel
Type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 10002 (Hexadecimal)
UserEnvDebugLevel can have the following values: NONE 0x00000000
NORMAL 0x00000001
VERBOSE 0x00000002
LOGFILE 0x00010000
DEBUGGER 0x00020000
The default value is NORMAL|LOGFILE (0x00010001).

Note To disable logging, select NONE (0x00000000).

You can combine these values. For example, you can combine VERBOSE 0x00000002 and LOGFILE 0x00010000 to get 0x00010002. Therefore, if UserEnvDebugLevel is given a value of 0x00010002, LOGFILE and VERBOSE are both turned on. Combining these values is the same as using an OR statement. 0x00010000 OR 0x00000002 = 0x00010002
Note If you set UserEnvDebugLevel to 0x00030002, the most verbose details are logged in the Userenv.log file.

The log file is written to the %Systemroot%\Debug\UserMode\Userenv.log file. If the Userenv.log file is larger than 300 KB, the file is renamed Userenv.bak, and a new Userenv.log file is created. This action occurs when a user logs on locally or by using Terminal Services, and the Winlogon process starts. However, because the size check only occurs when a user logs on, the Userenv.log file may grow beyond the 300 KB limit.

Although the 300-KB limit cannot be modified, you can set the read-only attribute on the Userenv.bak file, and the Userenv.log file will grow indefinitely. You must only use this method temporarily, remove the read-only attribute on the Userenv.bak file as soon as you are finished troubleshooting.

It entails modifying the registry but it would definitely seem you wouldn't have a problem doing that..

TechZilla said:

How is the Home folder being mapped to each machine? Are you using group policy to run a batch file on logon that runs a script to map the share?

No batch to map drive. The home folder is done here...

In group policy is "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" enabled?

Edit:

I had this bookmarked. http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/arc...d-folders.aspx

seth500 said:

Here is the only thing I found as far as a verbose output when a computer is logging on:

<snip>

It entails modifying the registry but it would definitely seem you wouldn't have a problem doing that..

That doesn't work in Windows 7. I have tried various combinations but that seems to be what is depreciated.

TechZilla said:

In group policy is "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" enabled?

Edit:

I had this bookmarked. Automatic creation of user folders for home, roaming profile and redirected folders. - Ask the Directory Services Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Home folders (directories) are already created and with correct permission. Most have years of files in them.

The group policy you mentioned above is also enabled.

Is Network Discovery enabled on the local Windows 7 machines?

TechZilla said:

Is Network Discovery enabled on the local Windows 7 machines?

It is disabled. (We never enabled it in the past when this worked.)

User/machines are on different subnets/VLANs throught the district and of course a seperate subnet/VLAN for the servers. What do you think this will buy me if I enable it? Why do wired clients not experience the issue with it disabled?

The Firewall is also set to disabled when connected to the domain (but enabled when off the domain) via Group Policy.

We (my company) just setup Home folders and I am reading through some of my notes and that was set to Enabled. We use an ISA FW which will create its own share of issues, but we had to set to enable Network Discovery on all for it to auto-map for us. If it is working on the LAN desktops then I would agree with you, it should work on the notebooks as well.

We never had a issue with notebooks in particular. It was widespread. But we did not setup Home folders until the entire company had been upgraded to Win7/Server 08. Do you have a mixed network, or are all your machines Windows 7?