Other sources of Network problems

This is a little old, but it is still useful. If you have switched off SMB2 and SMB3 on your networ as well as disabled OpLocks for SMB1 and still have problems with corruption, have a look below and see if some of these things might apply to your network.

Network problems are sadly getting more and more complex rather than straightforward with the number of different operating systems being combined on networks.

The consequence of running different windows versions on Workstations and different Versions of WIndows Server operating systems can cause unpredictable and hard to diagnose problems.

Drivers up to date? 

Windows networking is subject to a number of problems, MANY of which

can be solved simply by installing updated driver software from the manufacturer or (more

often) Microsoft. The link below will go to a web page that describes just ONE of the problems

in Windows peer-to-peer networking, yet there are several other problems referenced at the

bottom of that page. In particular, anyone on Windows 95 needs to get their network drivers

and "requestor" updated.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q...

and

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q...

in particular note some problems that can burn you.

Is your network slow when using a mapped drive letter?

The reason is this: The computer has both TCP/IP and NetBEUI (network protocols, similar to

different spoken languages). TCP/IP for the Internet and NetBEUI for the local network. TCP/IP

is the default protocol. When connecting to a mapped drive after some idle time, the computer

tries to connect first over TCP/IP and times out. Then and only then it tries the NetBEUI

connection. Go to the Control Panel > Networks > Bindings. Make NetBEUI as the default

protocol.

Is your network slow when using a mapped drive letter? (part 2)

Is the drive mapped to the main computer's drive or to a folder?

If it is mapped to a folder, you will likely see a decrease in performance, often a quite noticeable

decrease. We are not sure why this happens, but mapping directly to the drive has been proven

time and time again to be faster. We have not discovered the reason for this, despite extended

searches of Microsoft's tech database ( http://msdn.microsoft.com ).

Is your network slow?

Recently, we have noticed that the "Windows Indexing Service" has a seriously negative effect

on network performance. Turn it off. The indexing service scans your hard disk and indexes the

files so that the next time you do a file search, Windows can find the files more quickly. Turn it

off. Think about how often you do searches vs. how much time you waste waiting on your

network. Do a search and do other work while waiting for it. It?s just not worth waiting 99% of

the time to speed up 1% of your work.

Do some or all computers on your network randomly "die", "go to sleep" or "hang"?

Usually, this is caused by power management being active on the workstation and possibly the

server. Power management is a fancy computer geek word for "Windows has settings that

turns stuff off when it hasn't been used in a while". Power management is a bad thing on a

network. It's great on a laptop at 37,000 feet with 3 hours remaining of your flight, but it's far

more trouble than it is worth otherwise. Bottom line issue: You don?t want network cards turning

off because you haven't moved your mouse for 20 minutes. You don?t want your server's hard

drive turning off because no one has touched the server keyboard in the last 30 minutes (this

might make your workstations just a little bit cranky when they are trying to read stuff on that

server's drive). This is exactly what Power Management is supposed to do, but you don't want

this to happen when using a networked database. To investigate, go to Start, settings, control

panel (XP in "ugly mode" or Windows 2000) or Start, Control Panel (XP in "pretty mode") and

double click the Network Connections icon (if that doesn?t exist on your computer, you need to

find the place where you can change settings on your network cards). Find your network

adapter on this screen. Usually it will say something like "Local Area Connection" or "Wireless

Connection 1" (if you are ignoring our advice and using wireless). Right click that icon, click

properties. When the screen opens, you'll see the name of the network card up near the top,

just below the tabs. To the right of that, there is a Configure button. Click it. When the next

screen opens, there will almost certainly be a Power Management tab. On that tab, chances

are you will see a checkbox that says something like "Allow the computer to turn off this device

to save power". Uncheck the box and click OK until you don?t have to look at all these network

settings anymore. Reboot your PC, hope for the best.

Windows XP networking

Here is Microsoft's "best place to start" page for dealing with Windows XP issues, including

networking issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/highlights/winxp.asp

Windows 2003 Server networking

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;...

Workstation drive letters "getting the red X" (disconnecting from the main computer)

You can disable this by issuing this command from the DOS command line: net config server

/autodisconnect:-1

Before using this command, we suggest you read the Microsoft article that discusses

autodisconnect. You can find it here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;...

138365

Novell Netware problems?

The problem could be your Novell Opportunistic Locking setting. Contact your network person

for further details. How to turn it off? Goto Control Panel -> Networks -> Novell Client Properties

-> Advanced Settings Tab -> Opportunistic Locking and make sure this is switched off on all

client Machines - ALSO Make sure True Commit is ON at each client PC (This should help stop

data corruption)

Performance issues are often caused by network protocol "bindings"

Check the following Network protocols basics:

Make sure that your default network protocol has no bindings to a virtual device (dialup.....).

If you are using TCP/IP and you have dialup on this workstation, try NetBEUI.

Try to avoid using IPX and NetBEUI together. IPX gets confused when you have a "chatty"

NetBEUI. Removing IPX (if you can) is strongly advised.

If you need to examine the network further, check out

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/TdiMon.html to get a bird's eye view of what's going on.

Does the system work on some machines but seems to "think about it" and then do

nothing on others?

Sometimes your Windows doesn't have enough "files" set in your config.sys. Try 100 or 125. If

this isn't descriptive enough, you need to have your consultant do this for you. Sometimes

having full-time virus scanning turned on does this. Ask your virus software vendor how to work

around this OR exclude our program from your scanner if you can. Power management - Do

you have Energy Star features on your computers? Probably so. Power management and

networking DO NOT MIX. You can have your computers' power management features turn off

and/or dim the monitor, but DO NOT have them turn off the hard drive, network cards etc. This

will definitely cause you grief when computers are networked. Grief = lost data

Database corruptions, timeouts and other troubles

Another issue is the various ways that Windows try to improve performance, often at

the price of stability. Sometimes these things work, other times they cause network timeouts

because they force additional file operations behind the scenes and those file operations time

out (fail). One way to turn one of these items off is to turn off "Synchronous buffer commits". To

do this, click Control Panel, System, Performance, File System, Troubleshooting and check the

"Disable synchronous buffer commits" checkbox.

Database corruptions, timeouts and other troubles, part II

Further, Windows users face issues caused by some performance improvements that Windows

tries to implement with network applications by 'faking' multiple use of files. Unfortunately, some

users experience file corruption because of this. This article is a bit of nerd-speak, but your

network person should take a look at it if you are seeing "Access denied" errors on network files

when they *know* that the network permissions are set properly.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q... The topic of this article can also

be the cause of database corruption and network timeouts (drive not available messages and

the like).

Windows XP users - Turn off write caching

You need to disable the "write-behind cache". When the program asks to save the data, the

data is kept in cache on the local machine [until the cache is flushed] instead of being on the

server.

Right Click MY Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager

Right Click Disk Drive > Properties

Disable: Write Cache Enabled

Restart the computer

Published: 21/10/16 - 09:12:56 (Amanda Higgins)