RE: Network problem ... doing my head in

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Gerard,

just thinking out loud...

have you tried going back to first principles, and eliminating other
possibilities? - for instance, does the delay in explorer *only* happen
from
network clients? - is everything OK when you explore from the server
console?

If so, are you able to try it from a number of clients? - ideally different
flavours of Windows clients, to determine if the fault might be at the
server end or the client end?

I can't get rid of the persistent nagging voice in my mind that keeps
whispering "Name Resolution" at me... in my experience, a
staggering
proportion of problems such as this can often be traced back to name
resolution issues...

You've confirmed that you only have TCP/IP running on your network yes?
How do you provide name resolution between machines on your network? - are
you running an internal DNS server? - are you running an internal WINS
server? - do you have NetBIOS over TCP/IP enabled?

Don't forget that in Windows networking, there are two seperate, often
confused name resolution schemes, - the "Microsoft client for Windows
networks" is based on the old Lan Manager client, and as such uses
NetBIOS
name resolution, - this basically means WINS, LMHOSTS files, or broadcasts
on the local segment. When you use Windows Explorer to browse the network
neigbourhood and map to drives, this is the method you would be using...

However, different flavours of Windows clients will use different methods
(and in some cases in a different order), to attempt to resolve NetBIOS
names... If you have DNS configured, some clients will attempt to
"work out"
a NetBIOS name from a DNS Domain name by stripping off the all but the
lowest branch of the hierarchy...

for instance, if you have a server with a DNS name:
"server1.mynetwork.local" then that would be stripped back to
"server1" -
and that would then be searched for on the network as a NetBIOS host...

Many (many) things play a part in just exactly how windows networking
clients handle name resolution, there are so many things that they attempt
in order to get connected, that although it usually works, it can often be
very slow... diagnosing them isn't especially simple, I know people who
make
a living from very little else!

However, there is one thing you mentioned earlier that is somewhat
confusing, (and the reason I initially thought it sounded more like the
drives had spun down) - you said that when you first map to the share, you
browse to it, and map to it fine yes? - no perceptible delay *until* you
try
to read the directory structure?.... which would seem to suggest that your
client is resolving the resource names OK....


Paul G.

>From: "Gerard McGovern" <stuff@xxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
>To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
>Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Network problem ... doing my head in
>Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 12:44:32 +0100
>
> > The client machines are looking at the EXTERNAL DNS servers
> > first, to resolve the dns details of your server, obviously
> > it cant find them, so then tries using WINS (I think)
> >
> > Try setting up a DNS server on your server, redirecting to
> > the eternal servers and point your clients to your own server.
>
>Hmmm, I don't think that is the problem ...
>
>Just tried playing a song from my WinAMP playlist ... played instantly
>with no delay. Whilst the song was still playing I tried to access the
>network drive through Windows Explorer ... had the 15-20 second delay.
>
>Also checked the power management settings and they are all cool.
>
>

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