DNS and file access issues

[mattianuk]

Setup: win 2008r2 vanilla network, win 7 64x clients, office 2010

 

We have a strange problem at the moment. It involves multiple users accessing a shared file or folder on any of our shared drives. For example if all students try to open a powerpoint the teacher has made, powerpoint will hang for several users on downloading .....(filename)…… It is a random set of machines and users each time. It is also happening with different files and formats.

 

So doing some testing I tried pinging out from one of the machines that had a problem and it pings out fine and has a good IP address. No packets lost <1ms etc. However if I try to ping the machine from another machine that has not had the issue we get “destination host unreachable.” I then noticed that the IP this other machine is trying to ping is incorrect.

 

When looking into the DNS entries on the server I found that the entry in the forward lookup zone for this machine was incorrect. However the reverse lookup zone was correct.

 

This makes me think it is related to a DNS issue where the IP addresses are not being updated.

 

Any ideas

Edited December 7, 2013 by mattianuk

[free780]

Check event viewer on the client and the dns server.

[mattianuk]

Nothing in either any other ideas?

[kevin_lane]

If all pupils are accessing the same file in power point then there will be some slowness you need to also consider the disks on the server are they being iver worked could it be you need faster disks and also the file that is being used how big is it and what device is the file being opened on e.g wireless

 

These are just some of the things you have to take into consideration

[free780]

Have you given students list folder read access on the share? We had slow down on saving in office 2010. \\server\share\folder . Of course as always test test test.

[mattianuk]

If all pupils are accessing the same file in power point then there will be some slowness you need to also consider the disks on the server are they being iver worked could it be you need faster disks and also the file that is being used how big is it and what device is the file being opened on e.g wireless

 

These are just some of the things you have to take into consideration

 

All checked, and left as not contributing factors. All the servers run off one SAN as VMs, it mainly happens to PowerPoint files, regardless of size. It has never happened to non office files, and will affect as little as 2 machines.

 

( just read what I posted, which is what my tech sent, and didn't mention the above, sorry)

 

I am mainly interested in why DNS would mess up like this? I have cleared the DNS/dhcp emtries before, and they have got new ones and all been fine, however it appears they go back to the issues described above.

[kevin_lane]

Strange are there any issues on the clients in the event viewer? you could always try prefmon the ms tool and run it on the client and see what is happening when the file is executed

 

If it is spreading then has any changes to any switching config change also how many dns servers do you have and can they see each other properly

 

Have you had any issues with permission on files and folders e.g security sid taking longer to resolve

 

Are these clients all on dhcp

[Shocker]

just out of interest have you got scavenging switched on for DNS records?

[mattianuk]

I don't know. I have heard of this before, and it was something I wanted to look into to see, what is it and how?!

[Shocker]

it clears out old dns records I had noticed on our system a computer having two different IP's and when I done an nslookup on the computer it brought up the old IP address. if you got to your DNS settings and click on the scope and then right click and go to properties there is a tab for aging from here you can set when it clears out old dns records for instance I think the default is 8 days we have ours set out less than this but from this our computers no longer have two or more IP addresses assigned. This might help with the issue.

 

When I say assigned I mean when dhcp gives out and ip address and the lease expires the DNS record stayed for that machine even though it was given a new IP address so under my DNS settings a computer which recently received a new IP address also had its old IP still under DNS which meant when I done an NS lookup it was returning the old IP address.

[mattianuk]

Cheers, what did you set it to?