> I like the way you present your case. Thank you. I'm learning simply by reading your post.
Thanks!
I think I was experiencing two issues (maybe more). First, I believe some connections were being dropped because of inactivity as described here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/297684/mapped-drive-connection-to-network-share-may-be-lost
I believe I have addressed this issue by running the following command on each workstation:
net config server /autodisconnect:-1
Second, I believe that there is an oplocks issue with Abobe Creative Suite programs (especially InDesign). I found that if I released all of the locks for the affected user(s) (i.e. kill the pid of the smbd process for the affected user, this can be found using smbstatus) that seemed to resolve the issue.
I have added kernel oplocks = yes to smb.conf (/usr/share/zentyal/stubs/samba/smb.conf.mas). If the problem reappears I will turn off oplocks entirely, if that doesn't work I revert to trying random solutions I find on the internet. (tried this, but it seemed to cause issues for Autodesk users).
As I mentioned, I am running Zentyal on a VM under proxmox. The shares are actually on the host machine (proxmox) and shared with the Zentyal VM using the 9P filesystem. This seems to be a pretty slick method and the performance is quite good. If anyone is interested in this some information can be found here:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/virtfs-virtio-9p-plans-to-incorporate.35315/#post-184993> I think this issue should be studied from the Windows Client side. Did you check the Microsoft event viewer of these clients?
Good suggestion, I should have done this, I got focused on the server side logs. I will take a look. I also should crank up the logging level on the server.
>Did you check the shares accessibility through the IP instead of the UNC while the issue self manifests?
The affected workstations could not access the shares suing the mapped drive letter OR the UNC path OR the IP (we tried them all).
As an aside, I had a weird issue that I believe is unrelated to my other issues. When things were working fine, I could get to the shares just fine by typing the UNC path into the windows file explorer address bar, but when I typed the IP address (\\10.10.10.1\SharedDirectoryName). It would either take a long time to load the directory or give me an error saying that it was not available. The firewall logs showed dropped packets from those clients on port 111, so I opened up port 111 on "Filtering rules from internal networks to Zentyal" and the issue went away. Is this some new windows 'feature' or 'security measure' or do I possible have something setup wrong?