Weird Network Issue

gibo_ie

All,
any help or thoughts on the following issue will be greatly appreciated.

I have a WAN with offices in Ireland, Belgium and the US. Things are fine in Ireland and Belgium but the US (typical) is giving trouble. What is happening is that we have a Windows 2003 PDC (IRE) and a Win NT BDC (US). Users are all on XP. Now what happens is that every so often the user will try to connect to a network share (local or across the WAN) and it will prompt for a username and password (which the user is already logged in and should not need). When they use their details it says that they are already logged on and to try again, therefore not letting them access the shares. Then the next day it may work.
This is the same for local shares in the LAN so is not a VPN issue. DNS/WINS/DHCP are all local on NT server.


Any thoughts ...ideas.....???
hanks in advance
Gibo

ressem

already logged on and to try again

Does it say who they are logged on as?
Sounds as though some program, backup routine or service, might have logged on as one user to the server and will not let you log on as the domain/username till this share is disconnected.

Most obvious case is file shares. See explorer/tools/disconnect network drive.

There might be some shares that are not mapped to drive letters.

disconnect and try to connect to the server again.

snappieT

Do you not have to log in as a user on the shared machine?

I know at home, to access files on my PC from my laptop, I've to type in my PC password.

gibo_ie

yeah, unfortunately this is not a simple problem. Even with rebooting/disconnecting and reconnecting this issue is not resolved and is hard to replicate.
It is really annoying as it is working for two at the moment and not for another 2!!!

ressem

You've tried

List sessions from a given machine
NET SESSION \\ComputerName

on the server?

And
Disconnect sessions from a given machine
NET SESSION \\ComputerName /DELETE

Before trying to reconnect to the server?

Hecate

Check the event logs on both domain controllers.

Is it possible that the PDC is somehow failing over to the BDC periodically - and that they do not have synchronised copies of the auth info, causing the intermittant problems you describe?

bricks

On the client get one of the users to open a command prompt and check the logonserver variable. I'd imagine the ones that work are using the local NT domain controller and the ones that don't have picked up the remote domain controller.
Does the WINS server in the US have correct Resource records for both domain controllers?

gibo_ie

bricks wrote:

On the client get one of the users to open a command prompt and check the logonserver variable. I'd imagine the ones that work are using the local NT domain controller and the ones that don't have picked up the remote domain controller.
Does the WINS server in the US have correct Resource records for both domain controllers?

How do i find which DC a machine is connected to?

gibo_ie

answer my onw question:
echo %logonserver%

seems like this may be the issue as when i log on as a new user, it looks to the Ireland PDC to authenticate and then works fine!!

I need to upgrade the BDC from NT to 2k3 i reckon.
thanks for the help