Folder Redirection / DNS / Offline Folder issue

[calebb]

I have been using Folder Redirection for the last ~6 months in my organization. It works great with Win2K/WinXP/Vista clients 99% of the time...

I have a few WinXP users (notebooks, these users also connect from home via Microsoft PPTP VPN client) that occasionally have issues. Some mornings when the users arrive and attempt to connect to our fileserver - let's call it \\NAS\ for now - they will only see \\NAS\users\username - And their My Documents folder will be correctly listed here.

\\NAS\ is a Quad Core / single socket server running Windows Server 2003 R2 x86

According to the Sync Manager, everything is "online" so supposedly, this is actually looking on \\NAS\ and not on an offline copy... but no other shares are listed! Normally they would see a directory listing other users' folders as well as a few other shares at \\NAS\ - but when this problem occurs, nothing else is listed except \\NAS\users\username

Their systems were not in sleep or hibernate - normally their laptops were completely shutoff prior to turning them on in the morning.

If they connect via IP address instead of name, they see all the shares - i.e., \\10.0.1.50\ will display all the shares on \\NAS\ - all the shares work correctly when connecting via IP address.

From the command prompt, I can run "net use" and see the shares that are in use - usually \\NAS\ is listed. If I run net use \\nas\users\username /delete and then again attempt to connect to \\NAS\ , the problem is still not resolved and no additional shares are shown.

ipconfig /flushdns does not change anything either... oh, and nslookup NAS returns the correct IP address for the NAS. There is nothing in any users' host file.

Additionally, any mapped network drives on \\NAS\ do not work when this problem is occuring.

And, here's the least fun part... ~10% of the time, this problem happens suddenly, in the middle of the day, to just one or two users.

Rebooting their PC always fixes the problems. In some cases, the problem has come back the same afternoon, within 1 hour of a reboot.

Any suggestions? Folder Redirection actually works very well for our company, but if I cannot get to the bottom of this, I will probably disable it and find an alternate method of keeping differential backups of their My Documents / Desktop folders.

Thanks!

 

[calebb]

I actually ran into this problem on my own notebook today for the first time. (which is odd since the issue has occasionally occurred on other laptops for a few months now).

The other odd thing is that I'm using Vista Business - so that rules it out as an XP-specific bug.

 

[Captain Colonoscopy]

Have you tried manually synching the off-line files withouth logging out or rebooting? Sometimes that works for me. You also might try a good CCleaning of those users' machines and deleting the local off-line cache, could be some corrupted junk causing the issues. I have this problem from time to time on my work XP Pro laptop, maybe once every other month. I also have a desktop at the office that I run Vista Business on. Both machines are running with me logged in when I am in the office. I always assumed the issue was something with synching between XP Pro and Vista Business at the same time so I never really bothered to see what the underlying cause was. Usually forcing a synch, even if it says synched already, or logging out and back in will fix it for me.