Network Disconnects in Leopard AND Tiger

This has to go down into one of the X-Files as this is too weird to be a coincidence. Just yesterday, I spent half a day at a client site troubleshooting network disconnects. The parameters are as follows: all Macs are running Tiger 10.4.8, the shared network volume is a Windows 2003 share, and the share is SMB (not Appletalk). In every case, the random disconnect happens only when a Mac user is saving a file to the shared SMB volume. Windows users are not affected.

This error had stumped me as I had never seen it before and not with such alarming regularity. Four or five Mac users were seeing this disconnect message at least once a day. Scouring the Windows logs and the Mac’s console logs didn’t reveal anything. And, the weird thing is that if the user ignored the message, eventually the file would save just fine.

Here is the message error:

Now, today, I was running my Retrospect backup (which if you read my earlier post failed to complete and locked up my Mac) and I got the same message for the first time EVER. Weird (or is it me??). In fact, my message appeared every few seconds followed by a second error which appears to be a Leopard-specific error.

So where did this come from, what is the cause, and more importantly, what is the solution? This is definitely an Apple file sharing problem that only happens with high traffic or high activity to a Windows-mounted SMB share. It doesn’t happen with Mac clients connected to Appleshare volumes (either on a Mac or Windows server) and it doesn’t happen to Windows clients.