Not connected/ No Connections are available, yet connected anyway ??

[DrCheese]

Bit of an odd one this.

 

A student will log on, get all their redirected stuff but when they try to access anything network wise they can't. They can however access the Internet and they can see the correct redirected startmenu/desktop

 

There's a big red X over the network icon in the tasktray that says the network is disconnected and "No connections are available"

 

This is a total lie because you can ping the computer, VNC/remote into it and add files to the redirected desktop from another computer and they appear instantly. Running ipconfig via psexec from another machine doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. Event log says nothing either.

 

Unplugging and replugging the cable doesn't help, the only way to fix it is to logout, delete the users local profile and then back in again.

 

It's really bizarre but it's a real pain trying to google the problem as you have thousands of people with genuine network connectivity issues.

I did find one post about some permissions on a registry key, but I don't think that's what is causing this issue for us as it makes no sense why relogging would solve the issue.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/df17c593-e78f-4878-97b0-7569307934c5

 

I've been hunting through the MS knowledgebase to see if there's any hotfixes relating to this for post SP1, but I've yet to find any.

 

Just wondering if anyone else has had this problem and if they managed to sort it.

Edited May 5, 2011 by DrCheese

[john]

What Network Card is in it? I've had some awful issues with a couple of on-board Realtek Gigabit ones doing random things like that but the latest drivers from Realtek have settled that issue down.

[SYNACK]

I would point at the NIC also given my experience and subsiquent post here about Intel's lates bag of cack. In this instance though I think is has to do with the NLA (network location awareness) service that handles the little fancy icon telling you if you have net access or not along with DNS.

 

Are your student shares on DFS and do you use a FQDN to reference them. We had an issue where it would not play nice with the netbios name of the domain so the fqdn was needed \\school.intranet\shares\ instead of \\school\shares\ something like this could be causing issues.

[Steve21]

There's a big red X over the network icon in the tasktray that says the network is disconnected and "No connections are available"

 

 

Funnily enough we had a similiar issue here over last few days. But it was it saying "no internet" even when we could connect. In the end the NM fixed it by resetting the clients "netsh winhttp set proxy" and after a few minutes it was happy.

 

No idea if same thing would be issue with network showing offline too.

 

Steve

[farley]

mine alwaya says offline but my internet works anyway lol

[DrCheese]

In this instance though I think is has to do with the NLA (network location awareness) service that handles the little fancy icon telling you if you have net access or not along with DNS.

Aye, I think it's related to this in some way. It's getting confused and thinking that it has no network. I did try restarting the NLA service but that didn't help. It's annoying that it doesn't log much.

 

It's annoying because it happens mostly on student logins, so I'm very restricted to the diagnostics I can run. The one time it did happen to a member of staff I had to fix it quickly (By deleting her local profile) to get her working again so even then I didn't have much time to work on it.

 

As for the network cards, it's happened on both Broadcom cards and Intel cards.

 

The worst is that I've yet been unable to reproduce it at will >.<

[DrCheese]

Ok, got a lot more info on this. By luck it happened when I logged onto a PC yesterday so I had full admin rights to diagnose it properly.

 

It turns out that it has nothing to do with networking at all. When you try to load explorer as an affected user you get "Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access this item"

You can access everything fine via cmd so it's not disk permissions. If you launch explorer via an elevated CMD prompt it works fine.

 

You basically get all of the symptoms listed on this error here

CTX128255 - User Profile Manager Error: Windows cannot access the specified device path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access this item - Citrix Knowledge Center

 

However, the fix on that page doesn't really help as it's targeted at Cyrix, and either way I don't have the usrclass.dat file on our "Default user.v2" profile on \\blah\netlogon - Nor would it explain why it's totally random. I can log the user on to a hundred PCs and it will only happen once, if at all.

 

It IS related to the users permissions to bits of the registry i.e for whatever reason affected users will not have access to "HKCU\Software\Classes" like they usually do. You can't even list the permissions via regedit.

 

I was able to force it to show me the permissions by launching regedit as SYSTEM using "psexec -s -i regedit" and then going to the affected users hive and all that's listed is "OWNER RIGHTS, SYSTEM, WinDefend"

On a working user, the permissions are "RESTRICTED, SYSTEM, , Administrators"

 

I admit I'm somewhat lost now. I can't find anyone else with the same issue other than that Cyrix blog above. I don't recall changing anything major recently, aside from rolling out SP1 just before half term. As I have no way of forcing the error to occur I can't tell if that is what is causing it. It's like something is upsetting it during profile creation.

 

I may have to log this with MS using our SA benefits, but I've never done that before....

 

Screenshots

Edited May 17, 2011 by DrCheese