We've been experiencing a strange, intermittent problem which seems to only affect a few random laptop users. What happens is that they can browse out to the afs root and sometimes down to a certain level but eventually they will hit a spot where they try to open a folder and after a long pause, the afs client returns an error stating that the path was not found.
I've tried to look through logs and trace dumps to find some indication of what might be causing the problem. So far, all that has led me to is performing a 'fs checkservers -fast' which reports that one or more of our afs file servers is unavailable. When this happens, I can ping the server from the user's laptop and ping their laptop from the server. It also doesn't affect anyone else and I could find nothing in the server logs indicating a problem so it doesn't necessarily seem like a server problem. It's certainly not a case of the server being down. However, what I found was that if I manually changed the IP of the user's laptop to something else and tried again, everything would work and 'fs checkservers' would report that all servers were ok. Setting the laptop back to DHCP so it retrieved its original IP address caused the problem to return. Also, if I manually set another laptop to use that IP, it would begin experiencing the same problem. So, it seems as if the server stops communicating with whatever is at that IP address. Then usually after a day or two, the problem just disappears on its own. Does anyone have an idea of what might be causing this? I have some of the log files and a packet capture from the client when this problem was happening if either of those would help diagnose this issue. Thanks in advance. Bill Webster
