Windows network shares

[MoVo]

Hello everyone,

A friend of mine has a small home network with his small buisness. They have a simple server for filestorage that exposes a few network shares to the office PCs. The router is a relatively high end combo-box (not the one provided by the ISP). The network has been working fine for the last few months, but a few days ago (after the scheduled server reboot) the client PCs failed to connect to their network shares. After a few reboots most of the client's connections worked again, except for one.

The one PC thats not working is causing the most headache right now. It is a notebook running Windows 7 Professional (it's due for a replacement) and it still refuses to connect to the network share and I don't know why. I tried every possible troubleshooting step known to me, but since I don't have too much experience with networks and the previous sysadmin (I'm just helping out until they find a new IT guy) left kind of a mess when it comes to networking, so maybe you could help me out.

 

The server with the network shares is called "server", the clients connect using \\server\<share name> to connect to the network shares and that wasn't an issue so far. The server (Windows Server 2008 R2) also has the static IP 192.168.1.1 (I really don't know why since its not even used for routing). The standard gateway and the DNS server run on the all in one router at 192.168.1.254. The clients are also configured with an unique static IP. The PCs also all share the same <company name>-Workgroup.

Pinging \\server doesn't work, its not able to resolve the hostname. Pinging the ip behind \\server (192.1.1.1) doesn't work either, its returing a timeout). I also tried re-joining the workgroup, but that didn't help either.

 

Do you have any suggestions where the issue could be? We need the system to work until we're able to get a new PC with Windows 10.

I appreciate your help!

[Electronics Wizardy]

DNS for hostnames works best if you manage dns well, best way to do that is to make windows your dns server.

 

Can you mount the server by ip? This seems like a dns issue.

[MoVo]

Mounting by IP also didn't work unfrotunately. Pinging the server IP resulted in a timeout.

Does Windows server run a DNS server by default or do I have to configure anything extra?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, MoVo said:

Mounting by IP also didn't work unfrotunately. Pinging the server IP resulted in a timeout.

Does Windows server run a DNS server by default or do I have to configure anything extra?

You need the enable the dns server in windows server.

 

Does the system report connection issues that can'be be pinged?

 

 

[Akolyte]

1 minute ago, MoVo said:

Hello everyone,

A friend of mine has a small home network with his small buisness. They have a simple server for filestorage that exposes a few network shares to the office PCs. The router is a relatively high end combo-box (not the one provided by the ISP). The network has been working fine for the last few months, but a few days ago (after the scheduled server reboot) the client PCs failed to connect to their network shares. After a few reboots most of the client's connections worked again, except for one.

The one PC thats not working is causing the most headache right now. It is a notebook running Windows 7 Professional (it's due for a replacement) and it still refuses to connect to the network share and I don't know why. I tried every possible troubleshooting step known to me, but since I don't have too much experience with networks and the previous sysadmin (I'm just helping out until they find a new IT guy) left kind of a mess when it comes to networking, so maybe you could help me out.

 

The server with the network shares is called "server", the clients connect using \\server\<share name> to connect to the network shares and that wasn't an issue so far. The server (Windows Server 2008 R2) also has the static IP 192.168.1.1 (I really don't know why since its not even used for routing). The standard gateway and the DNS server run on the all in one router at 192.168.1.254. The clients are also configured with an unique static IP. The PCs also all share the same <company name>-Workgroup.

Pinging \\server doesn't work, its not able to resolve the hostname. Pinging the ip behind \\server (192.1.1.1) doesn't work either, its returing a timeout). I also tried re-joining the workgroup, but that didn't help either.

 

Do you have any suggestions where the issue could be? We need the system to work until we're able to get a new PC with Windows 10.

I appreciate your help!

I guess as a first troubleshooting step, can you resolve the hostname of the server from the client PC on it's own?   You can do this by running nslookup from a command prompt: 

nslookup <server2008Hostname>

This should return the IP of the server (192.168.1.1), if it does not then there is an issue with the client actually even recognising that the server exists!  This means there could be an issue with the DHCP Server, the Network configuration, or the Network itself. 

 

Also, where is the DHCP Server hosted?  Is it on the router, is it on the Windows Server?  This is important as it can help us to further define the scope of the issue, and perhaps what is causing it, how to resolve it. 

 

I would also check the Firewall on the Windows Server, is it off? try and turn it off temporarily and see if your issue is resolved?  Also check the IP configuration on the client PC.  Is it connecting to the correct network? Is it using the proper DHCP server? Try and set it to manual settings and test it out. 

 

One more thing you can check is if you are able to turn off the firewall on the client PC and ping it from the server, see if this is a one way issue or a two way issue? 

 

Let me know what you find. 

[MoVo]

47 minutes ago, Akolyte said:

Also, where is the DHCP Server hosted?  Is it on the router, is it on the Windows Server?  This is important as it can help us to further define the scope of the issue, and perhaps what is causing it, how to resolve it.

DHCP and the standard DNS are both on the router. The windows server is just used for the network shares.

Quote

I guess as a first troubleshooting step, can you resolve the hostname of the server from the client PC on it's own?   You can do this by running nslookup from a command prompt

I will try that tomorrow, I courrently don't have access to the network.

Quote

I would also check the Firewall on the Windows Server, is it off? try and turn it off temporarily and see if your issue is resolved?  Also check the IP configuration on the client PC.  Is it connecting to the correct network? Is it using the proper DHCP server? Try and set it to manual settings and test it out. 

It is connecting to the same network as all of the other clients do. All of the clients are using the same DHCP and DNS server (runnning on the router box), and just this specific Win7 client cannot connect to the network shares.

49 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You need the enable the dns server in windows server.

 

Does the system report connection issues that can'be be pinged?

It just reports that the given network path cannot be found. I assume that is because it cannot reach the Win2008server, no matter if I'm using the hostname or the IP address. But using the IP address should at least return a ping, shouldn't it?

 

Edit:

The exact error message we're getting is "Network Path not Found" in case that helps

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, MoVo said:

It just reports that the given network path cannot be found. I assume that is because it cannot reach the Win2008server, no matter if I'm using the hostname or the IP address. But using the IP address should at least return a ping, shouldn't it?

 

Edit:

The exact error message we're getting is "Network Path not Found" in case that helps

If it can't be pinged there is some network issue or issue with the server. 

 

Id just wipe and reinstall the server, server 2008r2 is eol, so put something like server2019 or a linux distro as your file server.

[MoVo]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If it can't be pinged there is some network issue or issue with the server. 

 

Id just wipe and reinstall the server, server 2008r2 is eol, so put something like server2019 or a linux distro as your file server.

Thats the odd part, the server is reachable by the other machines with no problems. The client thats having problems is connecting to the internet just fine and also shows up the other computers in the network.

I already suggested a network overhaul with sufficient isolation between private devices and company devices, a server upgrade (probably with Unraid or FreeNAS) and offsite backups. But I don't feel like I have the knowledge (and time) to realize that, so I suggested he should try to get a good IT guy asap. Until now, I won't reinstall the server since the previous IT guy laid so many traps in the network configuration already, I don't feel like I could figure issues there out.

I will drive over today and check if the hostname resolution works. If not, I'll try to set the Windows Server as the DNS server. I'll also double check the discovery services on Windows. I'll also double check the network connection of the server.

I'll let you know as soon as I tried all the troubleshooting steps you mentioned.

[MoVo]

Thank you for your suggestions, unfortunately nothing really helped. Looking up the hostname resolving using nslookup did result in the right ip, but the connection still didn't work. Pinging the server's ip resulted in a timeout, but the other services like the webserver running on that server are accesible on the same machine.

I improvised a solution adding a startup script that unmounts all of the network-shares and adds them back by IP. That seemed to work fine. Since the server is feeling rather unresponsive (its a rather old one, but since its only a NAS with relatively few clients I figured it'd be fine; I double checked and its actually running Windows Server 2012 R2, not 2008. But still, its eol) I have a feeling that the connection doesn't actually fail but rather time out. For the time being the solution helps until the long overdue network/hardware revamp is done. The notebook that's causing the problems is probably going to be replaced within the next two months.

If my friend considers a revamp I'll suggest a FreeNAS/Unraid/similar machine instead of a Windows server (although I'll have to double check if they have software that requires Windows server).

thats a bit OT, but can you recommend good resources for company-servers for small companies (around 10 clients). I see a lot of people recommending "old" enterprise server gear, but is that actually a good option? (They don't have huge storage requirements, they'd be probably fine with 4TBs of redundant storage).

 

Again, thank you for your help!