Topic: Intermittent Server Issue

[Zippy28]

I have a set of users using SME as their file server in their office, basically an ibay mapped as their z: drive. About 2 months ago they started saying that every now and again the z: drive would be totally unavailable for a few minutes and then come back ok again. Is there any known issue that could be the cause of this or would anyone have any suggestion to something I could try to rectify this?

There are 3 users networked to the server so I madde sure to get them to verify that it was down for all of them and not just one and asked the users to keep a log of downtimes. Here is a few days of the log:

16/09/2008 15.30-15.37
18/09/2008 10.30-10.33
24/09/2008 12.08-12.10
26/09/2008 09.12-09.15
26/09/2008 11.10-11.12
07/10/2008 10.57-10.59
07/10/2008 11.00-11.02
07/10/2008 15.37-15.39
13/10/2008 09.38-09.41
15/10/2008 11.39-11.43
20/10/2008 14.40-14.42
20/10/2008 14.44-14.48
20/10/2008 14.49-14.51
21/10/2008 14.42-14.44
22/10/2008 14.02-14.04

My concern is that these outages seem to be happening more regularly and closer to the same time of day as time progresses. Any help is appreciated.

[mercyh]

Lots of possibilities, but in my experience these kinds of intermittent problems are usually hardware.

Look at the connection logs and see what is there.

Try to catch the server in a "downtime" and ping it too see if you get really long return ping times. (signs of a network problem) or better yet load this http://www.colasoft.com/ping_tool/ on a windows machine and set the server IP as the target. You can then check the graph and see if network is an issue.

[gzartman]

Zippy,

Z: is not a good drive letter to use to map SME Server ibays to windows users, as Z: is the default home drive (directory) for windows clients.  Using this drive letter will very likely lead to confusion.

There are 2 solutions depending on your Windows Network Configuration:

1.  If your network is a Windows Workgroup Network (i.e., peer-to-peer), then I would suggest that you talk to your people and tell them not to map shared network volumes to local Z: drive.  There is no real way as a network admin to force drive letters on clients in a peer-to-peer network.

2.  If your network is a Windows Domain configuration, then you can force drive mapping on clients by configuring the netlogon.bat.  (note: netlogon.bat is sent to all authenticated users when they first log into the domain)  This file will force drive letter assignments on authenticated users.  The format of this file is as follows:

 net use g: \\smeserver\share_name\

Beyond mapping drive letters, netlogon.bat can set several other network client options.

Bottom line is Windows network clients should never manually map network shares to the Z: drive letter -- it will only cause confusion.


Greg