Group policy waited for the network subsystem
- by the-wabbit
In an AD domain with Windows Server 2008 R2 DCs users are complaining about delays in the bootup process of the clients. The group policy log reveals that the client is waiting ~ 20-50 seconds for "the network subsystem":
Event 5322, GroupPolicy
Group policy waited for 29687 milliseconds for the network subsystem at computer boot.
This appears to be domain-specific as machines joining a different domain from the same network do not experience any delays and Event 5322 reports <1000 ms wait times at startup. It happens on virtual and physical machines alike, so it does not look like a hardware- or driver-related issue.
Further investigation has shown that the client is taking its time before issuing DHCP requests. In the network traces, I can see IPv6 router solicitations and multicast DNS name registrations as soon as the network driver is loaded and the network connection is reported "up" in the event log (e1cexpress/36). Yet, the DHCPv4 client service seems to take another 15-50 seconds to start (Dhcp-Client/50036), so the IPv4 address remains unconfigured for a while.
The DHCP client's messages in the event log are succeeding the service start of the "Sophos Anti-Virus" service (Sophos AV 10.3 package), which I suspect to be the culprit - the DHCP client service dependencies include the TDI Support driver which might be what Sophos is using to intercept network traffic:
Network Location Awareness seems to break at startup as a side-effect, I see that off-site DCs are contacted due to what seems like a race condition between the GP client and the DHCP client / NLA service startup. I could set the Group Policy Client service to depend on NLA, yet this still would not eliminate the delay. Also, I am not all that sure that this is a good idea.
Is there a known resolution which would eliminate the startup delay?
