Re: Workstations are going offline! Help!

Dave Nickason [SBS MVP] wrote:
Brian - please stop changing settings experimentally. Hopefully you've noted anything you're doing with NIC drivers, etc. so you can undo it. Presumably you have identically or very similarly configured workstations, of which most work. And, you can ping, so it's unlikely to be a NIC thing.

With a dozen or more services not starting, you've got a problem that's unrelated to drivers or group policy settings. Again, remember group policy is applying to the working PCs too, so if it were group policies, nothing would work.

Dave,

I have the same nic as Brian's workstations in my laptop and I've seen the exact same symptoms as far as losing access to shares goes (Broadcom NetXtreme). When offline files are in use and you are offline (but still connected to the network) access to shares and printers disappears even though other TCP/IP things like ping still work. This is probably designed behaviour.

The root problem is why your PC goes offline in the first place, and the problem "You experience intermittent communication failure between computers that are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003" addressed in http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=904946 may be the reason why an offline state is detected at all.

The solution given is to disable checksum offloading by modifying a registry parameter. This can also be done in the nic driver settings, and touch wood, it seems to have done the trick for me.

Granted, I don't have a whole slew of failed services on my laptop, but I did experience the other behaviour. Maybe Brian's problem is different, may be he has more than one problem, but you cannot rule out nic issues given the behaviour I have described and the MS KB.


-- stephen
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