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Disappearing Shares Problem

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15 replies

by paladin46

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We've had a problem recently with shares becoming unavailable. This has happened on both Domain Controllers and Member Servers. The servers are still able to pinged, but you cannot connect to any shares, and most of the time you cannot connect through Terminal Services or Computer Management. Once the server is rebooted the shares return.

15 replies

by netlion

When you check the server are the shares actually gone or do they just not appear in network neighborhood? You may just have a browsing issue. Right Click on My Computer and click on Manage. Look under Shared folders \ Shares. If they are still there then they really haven't gone away. You can also check by connecting to a known share using \\server\share syntax. If it is browsing let me know and we can work on your next steps.

by paladin46

When logged on to the server locally, the shares appear intact. From neither the server itself, or another PC can you either see (\\ hit enter) the shares, nor can you map to a drive using net use, explorer, etc.

by curlergirl

My guess is that something running on those servers is hanging and causing the RPC service also to hang, thereby making it impossible for anyone to access any shared resources on the server. I've had this happen occasionally with some utilities and antivirus software. My suggestion would be to uninstall, one by one, any utilities, like defragging or antivirus software, that you have running on these servers until you find that they no longer hang. Once you get to the point where they're no longer hanging, you can try re-installing the software utilities until the system starts hanging again. The likelihood then is that the last utility you reinstalled is the one that is causing the hanging.

This sort of thing can also be caused by hardware, though, so if you don't have any of these types of utilities running on your software, you need to look at hardware issues. It could be faulty memory, CPU's overheating because of cooling fan failures, or something of that nature.

Hope this helps!

by paladin46

We originally thought that another program could be causing it too, but it also happened with a bare bones W2K install, without any 3rd party apps installed. We've also run extended hardware diagnostics on most of the boxes and they've come up clean.

by paladin46

We do run policies, but can you expand on how you think this could be causing the problem? Have you seen or can you give me a specific example of how this could be?

by blackdiamond

Hey,

This is not really a solution, just trying to collect more data. When looking at the shares when this occurs(Before Rebooting), have the share/security rights changed at all? We had a vendor that was running a process and did not realize it but they were inadvertently killing rights on the shares.

Thanx

by rnwindahl

I was looking to see if it was a Master Browser problem. The AD server should be the only master browser. Shut it off on everything else.

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