windows XP clients automatically reconnecting to shares

[Montenegro, Michael H (Michael)]

I found the solution to the problem we were seeing below.

It turns out that there was 3rd party software installed for asset management purposes that was performing hardware scans on the Win Xp clients.  These hardware scans turned out to have a bug that would access all network drives as a part of its daily scan that was scheduled at 10am.

I figured it was a long shot to post here since I knew it was not a Samba issue but at least it will serve as a point of reference for any others that my run into this problem.

One note regarding this issue is that the mass network drive connections that we were seeing only impacted performance on Samba servers.  I initially thought it was due to the large amount of shares the samba servers were sharing, but it turns out that some of our window file servers support many more shares and did not experience any performance issues.

Michael
  
		 -----Original Message-----
		From: 	Montenegro, Michael H (Michael)  
		Sent:	Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:21 PM
		To:	'samba-technical at lists.samba.org'
		Subject:	windows XP clients automatically reconnecting to shares

		I have a large samba deployment ~2000 mapped shares at any given point.  Our Samba environment is authenticating against an active directory domain.

		Recently, windows XP clients have started accessing our samba shares.  The clients don't have a problem accessing any shares and, to the users, everything performs fine. We are seeing that everyday at 10am these windows XP clients will automatically reconnect to their mapped shares. The clients are not being rebooted and the logs for these clients are not showing any other activity besides this reconnect at 10am.  This is degrading the samba server's performance. We are seeing this on other servers running different samba versions but it is not noticeable since there are fewer XP clients connecting. I tried manipulating various parameters on the samba server (deadtime, smb port, etc.)  but it doesn't seem to resolve this issue. It looks like the XP clients are initiating the reconnect.

		Does anyone know if there is a setting on the windows xp clients that would point to a reconnect setting? I have checked lanmanserver/parameters registry settings but nothing shows a setting that describes this issue.

		Thanks,
		Michael