[jcifs] Error message connecting to DC under load

[Michael B Allen]

Ingo Rockel said:
> Hi all,
>
> one of our customer reports problems with jcifs connecting to its DC.
> Sometimes a user can't login while later he is able to do so. The
> following error is logged, if the login attempt fails:
>
> <NETBIOSUSERNAME>: 0xC0000072: jcifs.smb.SmbAuthException: Logon
> failure: account currently disabled.
> jcifs.smb.SmbAuthException: Logon failure: account currently disabled.
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbTransport.send(SmbTransport.java:659)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.sessionSetup(SmbSession.java:189)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.send(SmbSession.java:148)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbTree.treeConnect(SmbTree.java:134)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.sessionSetup(SmbSession.java:183)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.send(SmbSession.java:148)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbTree.treeConnect(SmbTree.java:134)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.logon(SmbSession.java:85)
>          at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.logon(SmbSession.java:80)
>
> where I replaced the user name with <NETBIOSUSERNAME>. I was unable to
> isolate the problem on a test system, so can't set jcifs into debug at
> the moment, as the problems only occurs in the production environment.
>
> How  does jcifs reinitialize its list of available DC or just keep it up
> to date? They have a quite big forrest and about three DCs in every
> domain.
>
> Any suggestions, ideas, possible misconfigurations?

Actually I think this might have to do with trying to serialize
credentials. Are you using a cluster? What container are you using? What
version of jcifs are you using?

The "account disabled" error is occuring because jCIFS is trying to use
the default "GUEST" account but I'm not certain about what actually
triggers that. One possibility suggested by another using I think is that
if the NtlmPasswordAuthentication object stored in the HTTP session is
serialized and then reconstituted in a different VM (e.g. in a cluster
environment) the credentials will no longer be valid and the jCIFS client
fails over to GUEST.

Mike