Curse of the slow AD MMC

I thought I’d blog this just quickly.

I’ve been wanting to sort out a problem with a Windows 2003 Server my company has running at another annex. Luckily I got the chance this afternoon.

Basically the problem is that whenever I started up AD Users & Computers it would take an absolute AGE to start up. Once it had actually got in there, right-clicking anything again took decades to bring the appropriate menu up.

Having just googled for an answer I stumbled across a KB article titled Active Directory MMC Tools Are Slow to Initialize. Seems to be the right one I hear you all shout?

Well yes it was, at least it led me to the answer I needed anyway…

The server is also running as a NAT router cos there’s two networks in the one building. I know, I know, you’re all screaming “SUBNET it then you muppet!”.
Yes yes I know, sorry but once it’s deployed it’s a little hard to explain why I need to reconfigure it without looking like a complete doofus.

Anyway, the problem turns out to be the fact that the Outer Perimeter NIC was set to use the DSL router as its DNS and I think the bind order plays a part too but changing that on its own didn’t seem to solve the problem. Anyway the solution was to change the Outer Perimeter’s DNS to use the localhost and just configure DNS to forward unresolved requests to the DSL router.

Problem solved, MMC now flies like it has been wanting to for the last YEAR that I haven’t been able to tinker with this machine!