Topic: Losing network connections

[Luke Drumm]

Hi,

I'm not sure whether its a straight case of cause and effect or just coincendental timing but ever since upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1.2 my XP workstations keep login their connection to the server.

It seems to be a timing issue where if the network is not used by a workstation for around 15 minutes then the entire network connection for that workstation is lost (both to its peers and the server).

Judging by the dubious source of the light flashing sequence of my switch, it looks like the workstations are losing their IP address... but no obvious signs are showing up in the server logs.

Any ideas?

[Luke Drumm]

I forgot to mention that I've already tried 'releasing' on the workstations... all to no effect.

[Luke Drumm]

Not wanting to sound desperate but...

Ahhh... I'm desperate!  

Regards,
Luke

[Bobby]

Luke,

If you think the workstations are losing their IP number, have you tried assigning static IP addresses for the workstations?  Better yet, assign static to half of them and leave half DHCP just to see if that is the problem.

~B

[Lloyd Keen]

Luke,
I had a similar problem to that not long ago and it turned out to be a problem with the switch and full duplex mode. If the nic was setup to use full duplex it brought the whole network down (don't ask me how but it did). We were able to reproduce this time and time again. Once we put the nics back to half duplex everything worked perfect. There was no real loss in performance by doing this either. It wasn't a computer or server problem it turned out to be a problem with the switch and full duplex mode. It's probably nothing to do with your situation but I thought I'd share it with you as you sound pretty desperate )
HTH
Regards Lloyd

[Luke Drumm]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll try the static IP address approach first as the reason why I purchased the switch in the first place was for 100Mb bandwidth, and it seems a little silly to neuter it back to what I had orginally.

Regards,
Luke

[Lynn]

I had the same problem, but the cause might not be your cause.

I play Quake 3 through a firewall to test it. If the PC and firewall software can keep up with Q3, I'm happy with it.

I was losing connections while playing Quake after setting up my first SME Server, however.

Turned out to be the P1 motherboard I was using. It was a TX chipset that only supported ATA33. The Drive was ATA66, and thru a bug in the bios, the mobo would actually try to talk to the drive at ATA66.

This seems to be a common problem with older boards built at a time when ATA33 was as high as any HDD could go.

The system would hiccup when trying to write to the drive and lose connections for just long enough to bring it all down. After a short time, things would start working again.

Anyway, the point is, it may be a hardware problem rather than SME Server.