Slow Login For AD Mobile Accounts when off the Office LAN

Standard

This is an oldie but a goodie..

I’ve found in various environments that if you’ve got AD Mobile Accounts setup on a mac that has an Airport Card as is not connected to the Office LAN logins can take upto 10 minutes.

In all of these environments, the AD Domain was not resolvable outside the LAN.

There are three solutions for this:

  1. Allow one of your domain controllers & DNS servers to be accessible across from the cloud.
  2. Have an External DNS entry created for the AD Domain Name.
  3. Turn off the Airport card at logout.

The 2nd option only really works with Domain Names like mycompany.com, as you’ll have a website with a DNS name of http://mycompany.com. (Also, if you have this already in place you’ll not have the issue). But it’s not possible in all circumstances.

The 3rd option is the easiest to test & is the only real option in any environment with strict compliance polices.

We perform the 2nd option by running the below at via the JSS as a policy that’s triggered at “logout,” is also ran offline & is scoped to all Macs with an Wireless card, steps for creating an extension attribute for this can be found here.

Within Casper we have a Policy that has all macs that have an wireless card & then this script is ran at logout & is set to be run offline.

8 thoughts on “Slow Login For AD Mobile Accounts when off the Office LAN

  1. John

    I’m a bit confused as to what to do with the code on this page. Can you tell me step-by-step what to do?

  2. Tim Kimpton

    Haven’t experienced that myself. But what I do is have a script to make sure the user can’t have wifi on if Ethernet is connected and vice versa.

    • Ben Toms

      Hi Tim,

      I’m presuming your domain name is resolvable to outside of the LAN.

      Perhaps to your companies website?

      • Tim

        No not resolvable off the LAN. Have chached settings to log in 127 times off the LAN with the ADmitMac plugin and haven’t experienced that myself

        I read the first part of the incorrectly and thought Airport on was causing slow logins when on the LAN 🙁 I experienced problems in the past with both being on so control this with a script to either have it on or off not both ethernet and airport, plus airport automatically turns off if a user connects to a few known ssids in other buildings around our work which are open.

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