Equipment: HP OmniBook 4150, 128MB RAM, 3Com XJack CardBus NIC, Win2K Pro.
I have seen this problem pop up before with other computers on our network, but this is the first time I have been able to consistently reproduce it. It is really weird.
User has a laptop that mysteriously “falls off” the network when copying files from any other computer. The amount of data that produces the problem varies from day to day. But while copying files, the user will get one of two error messages:
1) Cannot copy file. The path is too deep
–OR–
2) Cannot copy file. The network name is no longer available.
When it happens, network access becomes VERY slow, and the user must reboot to get normal access back again.
If I set up a continuous ping of the machine (i.e ping -t) it will time out on about 19 out of every 20 packets. But the 20th packet goes through just fine in less than 10ms. User still has a valid IP address, and it appears to him as if he is still conected — justincredibly slowly. I can even relase and renew the IP address without problems.
The problem occurs whether the remote machine is in the same domain or not, and whether it is on the same segment or not. 100MBit LAN, or 128K WAN connection makes no difference. It’ll happen regardless if you’re copying a few large files, or hundreds of small ones. The computer gets it into it’s head that it’s only gonna copy 50 megs or so and that’s it; no matter how long it takes to transfer that 50 megs (it varies from day to day).
Can anyone tell me what is causing this to happen? Although it’s consistent on this particulat laptop, I’ve seen it happen a couple times before during my tenure at this company on different equipment. But in those cases, the problem went away by itself.
