Server 2003 Unable to View Shares

[pbolduc]

Well this is a pretty quiet form. Anyway, I just wanted to share with the IT community a strange problem that I was experiencing as well as a solution that has corrected the problem. If anyone knows in more detail why this would have caused this problem and can explain in layman terms, it would be much appreciated.

Here were the symptoms: I have a Microsoft Server 2003 Standard OEM SP2 server which has a mapped network drive to another file server for backup purposes. Over the course of a couple days this mapped network drive would stop displaying the contents of the shared folders and files, like they didn’t exist.

There would be 0 items in the folder shown whether the network location was browsed by IP address, through UNC\NETBIOS path or via mapped network drive. Hence the nightly backups were failing to run because it could no longer locate the share path to the backup folders. To my surprise, a purge of the NETBIOS cache and ARP cache didn’t correct the problem as I thought it might have. Please keep in mind even using the IP address of the PC and not the NetBIOS name it would still not display the share contents.

Sitting in front of the Server 2003 in question and accessing the remote file server shares would show 0 files or folders at the remote share location, even when I knew files and folders existed there. I have never seen a problem quite like this before. A quick check on the local PC hosting the shared files and folders revealed that all files were still intact and being shared on the network. If I removed the share and re-created the share on the host PC, the 2003 Server would be able to access to the files again for a day or two before it would revert back to showing 0 files at the remote network location.

What I had to do to correct this problem was to go to the Server 2003 SP2 which was having the problem viewing the shares and change the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Tcpip\Parameters
"EnableTCPA"=dword:00000000
"EnableRSS"=dword:00000000
"EnableTCPChimney"=dword:0000000

Or via Command line using netsh: Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED

I am curious as to why this immediately corrected my problem and I haven’t had a problem since and its been over 2 months since this problem surfaced.

Thanks in advance,
Paul