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I have a legacy application that I honestly do not know a whole lot about running on Windows 2000. Sometimes printing is slow. It creates a file at a remote location (I will call this location B) and then prints it. In order to create this file, the user has to mount a network drive using a different account from the legacy domain (they are not logged onto this domain).

When printing from PCs at location A, it takes about 20 seconds. When installing the application on a domain controller (of the new domain, not the old one) at Location A printing takes about half that time (10 seconds).

I have run a capture from one of the PCs (XP), (I don't have one from the Domain Controller). Most of the traffic and time seems to be used from microsoft-ds and SMB traffic. Once the client is ready to talk to the printer that doesn't take much time. Does WINs / NetBIOS maybe have something to do with it? I don't know too much about these protocols.

Any ideas on what to look for?

Update:
Neither client (the DC or the PC) have WINs or the legacy domain for ipconfig /all. Also, when I filter based on SMB.file == 'The file created by the repot' there is more than 10 times the packets and bytes. So there is far more SMB activity for that file.

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Do you have both domains in the client DNS search suffix? Are you running WINS that could ease in cross domain resolution? It sounds like the client is having trouble resolving the remote domain. I would look at name resolution to start and verify that the client can resolve the remote domain without any lag time.

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Mind spoon feeding me instructions for checking these? :-) – Kyle Brandt♦ Nov 17 '09 at 20:53
if you run an ipconfig /all on the client machines, you will see the DNS search suffix order as well as any WINS servers if they are configured. I would check whether there is a WINS server on the network and then whether the clients are configured properly. If there is no WINS server, we can add some entries to the lmhosts file that may help. Also, another test would be to run nslookup domain.local for both domains, you should get the results back for the domain controllers for those domains. This will test to make sure the client can find domain controllers for the domains. – Kevin Garber Nov 17 '09 at 21:00
The windows 2000 server is running WINs, so I set that as the WINs server but no improvement. Also, this is a network drive, and it is mounted by ip. Posted a little more detail about the captures: serverfault.com/questions/85967/… – Kyle Brandt♦ Nov 18 '09 at 20:32

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