Misc Windows issues

[cazoulay]

Background information:

1 Domain, 1 Forrest: Windows 2003 native level, 3 DCs using W2k3 R2
Use of DFS, roaming profiles, folder redirections to H:
Use of mapped drive: H: home directory S: shared folders
OS: XP, Win7
Files servers: 2 nodes M$ cluster W2k8 R2


1) Moving volumes from one node to another in our Windows 2008 R2 cluster still gives us a "Delayed write failed" on the workstations.
2) Deleted computers session got stuck on one domain controller. When trying to delete the session, a message stating that the computer object cannot be found in AD appears
3) Moving directories from one mapped drive to another works fine but if you try to rename the just copied directoy the system sates that it cannot because the file / folder is in used by another process. Waiting a couple of minutes clears up the message. This seems to happen only on Windows 7/Vista not on XP.
4) Drilling down DFS folders sometimes bring back the user to the root of the DFS link. A packet trace when it happens shows the following:

211  1:13:13 PM 9/9/2010  5.5020380  140.198.36.231  10.1.50.44
SMB  SMB:C; Tree Connect Andx, Path = \\AD3.GCCAZ.EDU\SHARED, Service =
??
334  1:13:14 PM 9/9/2010  5.7693650  140.198.36.231  10.1.50.44
SMB  SMB:C; Tree Connect Andx, Path = \\GCCAZ.EDU\IPC$, Service = ??

Thank you in advance for ideas, thoughts...

Cyril

[dsellens]

I am not quite sure I understand your issues.

1.  Are you talking about a failover by the cluster?  Whether a failover is triggered manually or by a fault there is disruption to services as they are discontinued on one node and restarted on the next.  For non-cluster aware applications such as simple file sharing, this will result in a loss of the connection and errors such as you have seen.  This is normal and to be expected with non-cluster aware applications that do not understand that they have to reconnect to the new node.  State information is not maintained during a failover and all connections are lost and must be reconnected.

2.  I am not quite sure what you are deleting and from where.  A computer session?  A User Session?  What app are you using to delete it?

3. Win7 and Vista maintain more locks for longer periods than does XP, particularly over network connections.  Sometimes trusting the file server makes a difference.  IE and Windows explorer are tightly linked when dealing with windows network shares.  Try the following in IE and see if it helps.  Under Internet Settings/Security,  Add the following to the trusted zone:  "file://servername" (with your servername of course).  This will trust the fileserver and keep it from making/enforcing some types of locks.

4. Again, where are you trying to drill down?  Are you in Windows Explorer or some other window?  Are you drilling down by clicking on the "+" in the folders pane or are you strictly in the files pane?  What is happening in the folders pane?  Does it appear that you are losing connection to DFS and it is reconnecting at the root?  I am not familiar enough with the SMB/DFS packet flow to know if the packets you listed are relevant without seeing a lot more of the trace.

[cazoulay]

first off, thank you for your reply and input.

1) I was talking about a failover by the cluster or a manual failover and I understand that there is a service interruptions (handles are being cut off, ...) however on the user side they are complaining that they have a popup message stating that the data has been lost and they are freaking out. So far, the only fix was to disable the message... Also it seems like we are the only one with this issue, which is odd if it is per design.

2) I am talking about a computer session. When a computer gets GPOs it connects to the domain controller and browse the DFS share to get them. Seems like some computers got stuck there for ever. Since the cleanup though it's been fine, I was just curious why computer sessions would be stuck there??

3) I will try the trust trick. I believe we already have it for file://domainname but not for individual node.

4) Using Windows Explorer and clicking down the directories in a DFS share. So far, we have investigated the issue and some similar cases have been found when you are using a Windows 2008 file server and a Windows 2003 domain controller. Everything is linked to SMB V2. When you disable SMBV2 on the servers and workstations the problem seems to go away.