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Windows Xppro Clients and Netware 5.0

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by manycaps 1 view

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Hello everyone, I haven't submitted a question here for quite sometime.
Here goes:

I have about 15 workstations running Windows
XpPro. We are still using Novell Netware 5.0 with
service pack 5. Occasionally, one of these xp users will simply attempt to open a pdf or a gif file or run a small executable file from my server and locks up their pc with no choice but to press the reset button.

Netware will still have their original connection number active with the open file/s, and their workstation somehow opens a new connection in the background and could have up to 3 or 4 new opened connections on my network. To top it of, my utilization then goes through the roof, up to 70-85 percent.

I've check novells knowledge base and found a few articles and they mentioned an issue with cache and that, there is no way to clear the connections except to restart the server..Of course this makes management and everybody very happy when I have ask everyone to "please log off the network for a system reset".

I've installed Client32 service pack 2 for XP, but
still didn't solve the problem.

I hope that I'm not the only one who has encountered this or nobody has ever heard such
a case.

Please help, any advice or info would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks in advance

2 replies

by a.bennett

I feel your pain .. we have similar issues but on a much larger scale with over 1000 workstations. Whilst we have not found a guaranteed solution to this issue, one of the things we have found helps is (apart from the usual caveat about making sure that your workstations are using the most current revision of the novell 32 bit client) is to turn off local caching in the properties tag of the netware client for windows and allow the novell file-system to handle it. We also switched from standard novell volumes to NSS file shares with some small further improvement.

We also found that when we upgraded the netware servers to edirectory 8.5.2 the workstations only seemed to open up at most 2 extra connections after the freeze.

You can change the connection settings on the novell server to be more agressive about timing out "idle" connections although this may be more of a policy issue for you if you end up dropping users who have simply stepped away from the keyboard.

This issue was a contributing factor in our decison to start a migration from Netware 5.0 servers to Windows 2K cluster. Hope this was some help!

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