Random shared drive drops between Server 2003 and Win7 clients

zero2dash

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Figured I'd see if anyone [H]ere has come across this problem.

We have shared public folders on one of our servers running Server [strike=]2003 Standard[/s] 2008 R2 Standard; all clients are Win7 Pro.

For some reason, the network shares will randomly drop out and become disconnected. Red X's, failure when connecting ("Share no longer available" etc etc). Anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two later, the share is reconnected again.

On my machine, I've tried running a ping -t to the IP of the server and the ping will run 99.9% of the time with no timeouts, but despite that, I'll still lose my shares randomly. This basically eliminates network connectivity as the issue. We've also tried switching cables and network ports to make sure it wasn't a bad port.

Today we copied the public directory to an external drive, ran that drive off another server (running 2008 R2) through the USB, remapped the shares....and no one complained of the share randomly dropping today.

We're not sure what it is on that particular server, but we've pretty much narrowed it down to that server. Not sure if it's a setting in Windows that's messing with it. We've disabled the firewall and the AV on that server. A guy at school I asked tonight mentioned stopping the Network Discovery service and/or flushing the DNS cache on the server....I was going to bring that up tomorrow and see if anyone's tried that yet.

Server is not even 7 months old. Dell Support is going to be getting a call probably tomorrow.

Any other ideas?
 
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Is this server a DC or anything or just a file server? You mentioned 7 months old, why didn't you go with 2008R2 on it from the beginning?
 
You notice anything in the event viewer at the same time when it drops?
 
I have the same problem. I thought it was bad patch cables, I checked my switches HP Procurves and no difference. I also checked the server and no issues either. I did notice that it only seems to effect win2k3 and Vista+ OS. I thought it was the NTLM cache issue but nope. I am still having weird problems. Odly enough it doesn't effect 2k8r2 and win7. On win2k3 and xp is fine.
 
on W7 there is a policy to disconnect drives after xx time period.
I had the same problem with a customer of mine on all 10 of his brand new W7 computers.
There is a group policy to change the timeout period....Ill check my notes
 
Control panel:> administrative tools :>Local Security policy:>Local policy:>Security options:>
set it to 99999 at "Microsoft Network Server:Amount of idle time required before suspending a session".
 
Is this server a DC or anything or just a file server? You mentioned 7 months old, why didn't you go with 2008R2 on it from the beginning?

It's our main file server....as well as our DC and DHCP server. And actually I was wrong in my OP; I thought it was 2003 but it is running 2008 R2. (I'm still trying to remember what servers are running what OS out of the 13 we have.) :eek:

We do have a few 2003's but those are smaller roles....a couple SQL servers, a video server, and a PCI server.

You notice anything in the event viewer at the same time when it drops?

No, nothing weird in the event viewer.

It's looking more and more likely that something in AD is just fubar'd. I've only been here 3 months now; my boss (the new IT Director) has been here I believe 6 months....and supposedly this server is one of the several things that he's really not happy about in regards of how it was set up. I think the end result is probably going to be that we're going to promote another server to DC, demote this one, and either do a clean install and re-run dcpromo, or we're going to just re-run dcpromo and fix it.
 
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