I manage a small windows domain for my home/home office. It consists of a PDC running Windows Server 2003 SP1 (I know! it's old! etc.) and a hand full of computers with fixed private IP addresses (10.x.x.x):
3 Win 10-64 Pro
1 Win 8.1-64 Pro
2 Win 7 Pro (one 64-bit, one 32-bit)
1 Win XP-32
My intermittent problem for the past year or so is that one of the Win 10 machines occasionally (maybe 3 times/month) suddenly cannot access any network shares on the PDC. This causes a number of automated backup processes to fail. When this happens:
(machine names and IP addresses changed to protect the guilty! :-)
- it can ping the PDC by name, so DNS is not the issue
C:\Users\XXX>ping MyServer
Pinging MyServer [10.x.x.x] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.x.x.x: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
Reply from 10.x.x.x: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 10.x.x.x: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
Reply from 10.x.x.x: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
Ping statistics for 10.x.x.x:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms
- this fails, with a fairly long delay before the error message appears (perhaps 2 minutes):
C:\Users\XXX>dir \\MyServer\backupfiles
The semaphore timeout period has expired.
- and yet this works:
C:\Users\XXX>dir \\10.x.x.x\backupfiles
Volume in drive \\10.x.x.x\backupfiles is zzzz
Volume Serial Number is 10C0-79BC
Directory of \\10.x.x.x\backupfiles
05/09/2021 08:28 AM <DIR> .
05/09/2021 08:28 AM <DIR> ..
05/13/2019 09:53 AM 23 BackupCacheRoot.txt
03/21/2019 12:14 PM 23 BackupRoot-ZZZZ.txt
03/21/2019 12:14 PM 23 BackupRoot.txt
05/25/2019 11:53 AM 23 BackupStagingRoot.txt
07/27/2020 10:43 AM 22 BatchFolder.txt
03/24/2019 09:36 AM 24 BatchJobFolder.txt
05/14/2019 08:13 PM 1,510 GetBackupLoc.bat
7 File(s) 1,648 bytes
2 Dir(s) 4,306,067,456 bytes free
- it can connect to network shares on other machines
The only way I can clear this is by rebooting the win 10 machine, after which all is well ... for perhaps a week.
I'd be grateful for any insights anyone may have.