We have workstations that appear to be losing connection to the file share on the server at almost precise times, every six hours. 7 AM, 1 PM, 7 PM, 1 AM; Repeat.
The event logs on the workstation and servers are clean, Domain controllers and file share server. So I assume the loss is not long enough for the OS to recognize it. Although we have a custom application running on many machines that can't seem to handle the brief outage and fails like clockwork. The application vendor tells us it has a sixty second timeout before it will fail; certainly long enough to handle any brief disconnect. Network traces (using wireshark) from the server to workstation and workstation to server do not show any sign of failure. A script that updates a text file on the server every fifteen seconds does show the failure, it fails to update the text file on the server for up to four _minutes_ at a time! Although during the four minute failure period it's able to update once or twice during the outage, so it's not a total blackout. Workstations map a drive to the file share using a DFS path; ie: \\domain\share <file:///\\domain\share> . So we tested a direct mapping using \\server\share <file:///\\server\share> , and we get the same result. We mapped drives to two different file servers, each file server is in a different building on different ends of campus. The workstations used four test drive mappings, two for each server, one DFS on each server and one direct for each server. All four drive mappings failed at the same time. The connection to the SQL server is never lost. The SQL server is plugged into the same network switch as the file server. The Windows Domain has no trusts; it's a single domain forest. There are no services on any server with a six hour schedule that we know of. Backup runs daily at midnight and completes prior to 7 AM. Virus scan is still running at the 7 AM hour, but is long since complete by the 1 PM hour. Both file servers are Dell PE 2950 running Windows Server 2003 R2; All drivers seem up to date with Dell's support site. Workstations are a variety of makes, running either Windows XP Pro SP2, Windows XP Pro SP3 and Windows Vista SP1 and are scattered all over campus on different network subnets. Our network department is telling us that the network is fine, it's either a workstation or a server issue. Anyone seen this type of thing before??? Thanks! ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
