NT4.0 Server Network Issue

[Allan The Shield]

Hello again,

one of our customers has two NT4 Servers on standard windows network. All the client machines are XP and windows 2000. The second NT4 server is a new server, dual pentium Xeon and Gigabit network. We have made this new server the main data store and this is what all the clients access for thier data/apps. However, every so often (mosrtly through the night) this server just 'Drops' from the network, throwing everyone out of documents and apps. The annoying thing is, you can still ping this server and even connect to its desktop VIA Win VNC!!! When you try and double click on this server in network neighborhood during its 'downtime' you get a message saying that the server is not accepting requests just now - please try later"...So the server still works on the network at IP level, but when you try to brows to it to remap drives or just to browse - its a no go!!!

The only solution we have just now is to re-boot the server which is becoming a real pain. the event logs show nothing whatsoever.

Any ideas?

 

[ITJunkie]

I'm not sure if this will help your problem or not but I had similar problems before and found that whomever created the domain, went with Per Server licensing instead of Per Seat. Even though we had all the CAL's needed for Per Seat.
This caused all sorts of connection issues due to lack of Server licenses or something along those lines. As long as you have CAL's for all users, it's best to use Per Seat licensing. I believe you can change from Per Server to Per Seat without having to rebuild the domain. You do all this through license manager, of course.
Also, are you running Small Business Server or full versions of NT 4?

 

[Allan The Shield]

They are full versions of NT4.

Interestingly enough, the day after we installed the new server we forgot to add in the 50 additional per seat licences. When the user limit breached the default 5, no-one could connect with the EXACT same error message that they get now.

Its almost like the concurrent connections arent being flushed from the NT memory and its throwing anyone out who cant connect. However, i dont think that would explain the way it just throws everyone out the server.

 

[Sunner]

I've got a similar problem.
Lots of our users will get their mapped drives disconnected randomly for no apparent reason.

Seems to be more prevalent on XP boxes by far, doesn't happen to some users though, me for example.
Doesn't close any open documents and such that they have, only disconnects the drives.

We haven't managed to figure that one out.

 

[Allan The Shield]

Originally posted by: Sunner
I've got a similar problem.
Lots of our users will get their mapped drives disconnected randomly for no apparent reason.

Seems to be more prevalent on XP boxes by far, doesn't happen to some users though, me for example.
Doesn't close any open documents and such that they have, only disconnects the drives.

We haven't managed to figure that one out.

What happens when you try and remap the drives on the troublesome machines?

Here we have a mixture aof xp, 2000 and 98, and it throws everyone out.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Allan The Shield

Originally posted by: Sunner
I've got a similar problem.
Lots of our users will get their mapped drives disconnected randomly for no apparent reason.

Seems to be more prevalent on XP boxes by far, doesn't happen to some users though, me for example.
Doesn't close any open documents and such that they have, only disconnects the drives.

We haven't managed to figure that one out.

What happens when you try and remap the drives on the troublesome machines?

Here we have a mixture aof xp, 2000 and 98, and it throws everyone out.

Works fine for a while again.
I've seen some people having similar problems when searching for a solution, noone seems to know how to fix it though.