Offline Files not staying connected after adding new DC

rsutton

One of the companies I do some consulting work for started having problems after I added a new, third DC for them. Certain random users will open their My Documents folder, which is mapped to a network location and it will open. Then after a few minutes it will disconnect and ask them to authenticate.

There are no errors on any of the DC's. All DC's are Windows 2008 servers. It's doesn't appear to be a layer 1-3 problem as I can ping the user all day without loss. Tomorrow we are going to capture packets and see what is happening right before the disconnect.

Any ideas? Am I missing something?

Hyper-Me

Is it an RODC by chance?

Is the network location on the new DC or a diff server?

rsutton

It is not a RODC. The new DC is the fileshare that has been hosting their network files, I just added DNS & AD to it.

dynamik

Anything in the event logs of the machines that are having problems?

NightShade03

Did you ever get to run the packet capture to see why is causing the clients the need to re-verify their credentials?

brad-

The same problem happened to me.

We had 1 DC and about 25 users redirecting MyDocs to the DC through offline files.

I added 2 DC's, changed the roles from the old DC to one of the new DC's, updated the GP to reflect the new machine name...some people's stuff worked, some didnt.

On the ones that didnt, luckily for me we have relatively few, I had to go to each machine and change the offline files path. I remember thinking - i'm glad not all of our users use this GP.

NightShade03

It sounds like the cache is not accepting the new GPO that you are creating. This happens all the time to us as we migrate users data constantly. If you re-initialize the cache that should take care of any problems and everything should re-map properly. You can force the re-initialize if you'd like with a logon script, but be VERY CAREFUL as if their data has been backed up and there are things only saved locally in the cache they will be deleted! Resetting the cache wipes the whole thing, but after a reboot it should pull down all the data all over again for offline storage.

rsutton

I have some time scheduled this morning to capture packets and check event logs on the machines. Hopefully the problem will be obvious after seeing that.

@brad - The location for the network files has not changed so I have not had to update any GP's.

Thanks all for the suggestions.