shares Windows network shares (sigh)

[nicky9499]

Gday all,

 

I've used Windows network shares for years and honestly it's like dragging yourself over hot coals but there's no real alternative for an average joe like me.

Basically, every once in a while something would break, sometimes due to Windows update and sometimes for no discernible reason. The outcome is always the same; many hours/days of faffing about on google, cursing, tearing down security measures, and it's all working again albeit with a lower level of security somewhere or another.

 

So the time now has come when all the brute force measures have been exhausted and I have no more firewalls to burn down, no more passwords to remove or permissions to give. Two days ago my sister complained that her W10 laptop could no longer connect to the W7 home server. So after the usual fighting with Windows and trying out a dozen internet suggestions and registry edits, it was working again. Not only that, my Mac could now also connect to the home server (it stopped working months ago and I gave up trying to make it work). In summary, the conclusion was something about disabling NetBIOS and IPv6 all around and also a bunch of registry edits as usual.

 

HOWEVER, it seems that the flipside of that is my main W7 PC now can't connect to home server. They're both gigabit wired to a router, but are also directly tethered to each other by a 10gbit SFP cable (from linus' tutorial a couple years back). This setup has worked flawlessly and never given me any problems with either speed or connectivity, even stuff like remote desktop. But no longer. I feel like I've read every post on technet twice already. I could try to recall and list everything I've tried but not before the heat death of the universe. Between work and rest and what little play I can get the last thing I want to do is screw around with Microsoft's nonsense networking. I'd just about do anything to have working, simple file sharing. Pinch a cat, slap an old lady, set Ballmer's house on fire, whatever.

 

 

----

So for the first time in my life I'd like to sit down and try a surgical approach with the hopefully kind people here at LTT. This has never worked in the past because all the places I posted (Stackexchange, Technet, Reddit, 7Forums etc) have either responded by completely ignoring noob like me, throwing out a bunch of incomprehensible jargon and code, providing pseudo-polite tech support that's irrelevant at best, or just inexplicable downvoting.

 

I know my way around a cmd window, so tell me what to do, what you need to know, what diagnostics and reports to produce, hell I'll even let you teamviewer in here to find out what's going on. Please help.

 

Home server: Windows 7 Ultimate x64, Gigabyte Z67, i7-3570K, 16GB DDR3, GTX1060, whole bunch of hard drives and Mellanox Connect-X 2

Workstation: Windows 7 Ultimate x64, MSI Z77, i7-3770K, 24GB DDR3, GTX1070, not as many hard drives but also has a Mellanox Connect-X 2

Router: Netgear R6400, cat5e cables all around

 

Thanks in advance guys.

 

[scottyseng]

Well, some questions:

Are you using the Mellanox cards as 10Gb NICs? Are they direct attached to the workstation?

As for general networking, does the server have a static IP address?

 

Generally when I got this error, I had to make my PC have my server as the primary DNS server.

[LinusOnLine]

I see a lot of people saying this but to be honest I have never had a problem with it. It could be a bit messy before if you did not understand workgroups.

[nicky9499]

5 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Well, some questions:

Are you using the Mellanox cards as 10Gb NICs? Are they direct attached to the workstation?

As for general networking, does the server have a static IP address?

 

Generally when I got this error, I had to make my PC have my server as the primary DNS server.

• Not sure if I understand the question correctly but yes. They're PCIe cards directly connected to each other (like in that linus 10gb networking video basically).

• The server has a static IP address, this is ensured in the router's LAN settings (MAC address reservation), IPv4 settings (for the onboard NIC, not the mellanox) and even somewhere in the registry I believe.

• I don't know which machine is the primary DNS server (isn't that the router's job?) but let's say I do this, how will this affect the other W10 and OSX machines?

 

5 hours ago, LinusOnLine said:

I see a lot of people saying this but to be honest I have never had a problem with it. It could be a bit messy before if you did not understand workgroups.

• They are all on the same workgroup, but now that you mention this I went to check on homegroup and found that for some stupid unknown reason my PC is no longer part of it and can't rejoin.

[alpha754293]

(DISCLAIMER: I AM reading and interpreting your question as you are trying to connect to your home server via the Mellanox card from your workstation (to the home server's Mellanox card) rather than trying to connect to it over gigabit ethernet. Please correct me if I have misread and misinterpreted that.)

 

So let's start like this:

 

1) Assign a static IP address on the Mellanox cards/ports as well.

 

I typically will put interconnects, especially if you have direct passive copper cable (presumably) directly connected between the two Mellanox cards across the two systems on an entirely different subnet from my main network that can reach the outside work. (i.e. my 10G and 100G PHY network layers can't ping the outside world. That's by design.)

 

2) Workgroups doesn't matter. I actually put all of my connections as public connections anyways (and this is because having a partially open firewall complicates passwordless ssh that occurs in between my systems due to the applications that I am running (for distributed parallel processing).

 

3) The DNS server for your Mellanox cards don't matter. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn't assign DNS servers to them (unless you REALLY want them to, but since they're directly connected to each other anyways, there's no point in enabling the gateway and the DNS your 10G ports since it can't communicate to the outside world via that link anyways.

 

It'd be a different story if your network topology was such that from your model (whatever you're using (e.g. cable/DSL/fiber)) to your first router (or firewall then router) -- unless that's also on the 10G network (which I doubt it will be), and also on the assumption that like you said, because they're directly connected to each other so you don't have a 10G switch, so there'd be no point in that.

 

(DISCLAIMER: I AM reading and interpreting your question as you are trying to connect to your home server via the Mellanox card from your workstation (to the home server's Mellanox card) rather than trying to connect to it over gigabit ethernet. Please correct me if I have misread and misinterpreted that.)

 

4) Once you've assigned a static IP address to the Mellanox cards, try the following (I'm not sure if this is exactly the same as the Mellanox ConnectX-4 dual port VPI cards, but you can try it anyways and see what sticks:

 

a) If your cards support PXE boot over the 10G cards, then you might see the FlexBoot BIOS of the Mellanox cards start up when you reboot or boot up your system (following POST).

 

Look for that. If you don't see it, then it might suggest that the card isn't seated properly within the PCIe slot and/or that there are issues with the slot or the power supply or the card itself.

 

b) If it FlexBoot POSTs, the next thing that I would check for is to go to Device Manager and see if there are any issues/errors/warnings about the driver loading and Windows ennumerating the hardware.

 

c) Download the Mellanox MST tools. When you installed the driver, you should have a folder called "Diagnostic Tools" in the Mellanox folder and once you install MST, you'll also have additional tools like mst, mlxconfig, mlxfwmanager, etc.

 

d) I would run mst to start the Mellanox configuration tools. And then I would see if I can query the card using mlxconfig or mlxfwmanager (mlxfwmanager -d <<device id>> --query).

 

e) If that DOESN'T work - I would suggest, if you have another drive available -- disconnect all of the drives on both systems related to the Windows installed and plug a small hard drive (SSD or mechanical) so that you can throw Ubuntu or some kind of Linux distro onto it so that you can load the drivers and see if the cards will come up for you in Linux. (I've found that to diagnose Mellanox cards, it's actually SIGNIFICANT better and easier to do it in Linux than in Windows. I had issues with my Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards in Windows, but the moment I threw Linux on the machine, the cards and the ports came up right away so I know that it isn't a card issue.

 

(Because in Linux, you can run hca_self_test.ofed and that will query the state of the card to make sure that everything is in good, working order. I don't remember if that's available in Windows or not with MST.)

 

Try that.

 

See if any of that helps.

 

(I'm writing this in this manner because these were some of the steps that I had to take when I was trying to diagnose my own issues with the ConnectX-4 card and Windows Server 2016, and right now, my system is still running Linux because while I'm at it, I might as well run a whole bunch of tests with distributed parallel processing while I'm there.)

 

Thanks.

[nicky9499]

OP here, with the same OP (original problem) with Windows 7 again.

 

This time with a Linksys EA8100 but this router is not the problem because it was swapped in over a year ago with no issues.

 

Instead, today W7 on two wired clients are giving me a 0x80070035 "cannot find path" error, despite both being able to ping each other and see each other in network devices. Both are directly wired to the router (switch is planned but I imagine that will be another clusterfk), and for purposes of this diagnosis I've even torn out the Mellanox cards from both machines.

 

I have manually installed KB4487345 on both. No go.

Deleted ALL the shares and re-created just one.

Everything is set to lowest security, no passwords required, access set to Everyone. They just stopped connecting one fine day. This is bloody ridiculous. It's Windows 7, supposedly EOL meaning Microsoft isn't actively screwing with it on a day-to-day basis. What the hell?

 

Can someone advise please.