Users logon issue that occurs every 8 days

[NewFormz]

We've got a bid of a weird one here, every 8 days users are not able to logon correctly.

 

This has been going on for a few months now and only happens to users that shutdown their PC when they go home. When they boot it up in the morning they don't connect to the file server and their profile will not load so they login with a temporary profile and have no access to the file server. They still have access to other shared drives such as the sims drive.

 

If we reset the file server it fixes the problem.

 

We've been investigating this issue for a while but have not been able to find a solution. This is what we have discovered so far:

 

If a user stays logged into their PC it works fine in the morning.

We have had machines around the school pinging the server and they have not dropped any pings when the error occurs.

No scheduled tasks that are set to run every 8 days.

Backups have finished long before staff get in, We even disabled them for one night to see if it had any effect and users still could not login.

The GPO that adds the file server fails to load.

 

Obviously that last one is a big clue but we have no idea why it only fails every 8 days.

 

It's really tricky to troubleshoot as we have to wait 8 days to see if any updates or anything else we try works. I don't want to have to keep restarting the server and would like to get to the bottom of the cause.

 

Has anyone else ever had anything like this or has anyone got any suggestions on what might be the cause.

 

Thanks

[MYK-IT]

A wild guess...

 

1) May be linked to a mixture of DHCP (lease duration) and DNS (scavenge stale resource records) misconfiguration? e.g. IP Conflicts, IP lease expiry etc

2) Network time on clients drifting out (by more than 5 minutes) over the 8 day period

 

I sometimes experience similar issues when first logging on (after switching on) e.g. no drives etc although usually a log off/on (or gpupdate /force) corrects it.

[robyholmes]

DHCP springs to mind as the default lease time is 8 days? Is that installed on your file server?

[sted]

it sounds stupid but have you got any iscsi connections listed on your server that it can no longer connect to. after a recent update we found that servers got slower and slower and eventually caused all sorts of weirdness to the point we had daily scheduled reboots and it was noticeably slower in the afternoon.

[NewFormz]

We've checked Network times and it's not that.

 

Our DHCP lease is 8 days so we will change it to 1 day to see if that has any effect. This is installed on our Domain controller not the file server.

 

Justo to add for more information, this problem sometimes fixes itself. Our staff that get in at 7 normally report the problem. If I'm at home I login and restart the sever. If I'm already on my way in it has sometimes fixed itself by the time I arrive, this is normally about 30-60 minutes after the problem has occurred.

 

We don't have any iscsi connections.

 

All our servers are running on VM ware.

Edited July 6, 2017 by NewFormz