Windows – Shares suddenly not working

active-directorydomain-controllerdomain-name-systemwindowswindows-server-2012

We are running a Windows Server 2012 domain controller in a small LAN with mixed XP SP2 and Windows 7 workstations. According to users everything was working right until some days ago. Now they can't access the shared folders or network drives. We also can't join new machines to the domain. The error message is about network path not found.

Relevant info:

  • DNS server is up and running OK. Machine names are correctly resolved (tested from workstations with nslookup)
  • Ping responses are OK between machines
  • We had Kaspersky Endpoint security 10 installed on the server, but fully uninstalled that product to discart some blocking (same problems after uninstalling the antivirus)
  • The required ports are opened and listening (tested with netstat -abn)
  • Permissions are OK for each shared folder (we have not done any changes during the last days). Some folders have been configured with full access for everybody but still are not accessible neither by name nor by IP.
  • Folder and printing sharing is activated. Network discovery is enabled also.
  • We disabled the Windows Firewall by stopping the service (same result)
  • This is weird: We tested ports with telnet (445, 139) with mixed results. From some workstations ports appear to be closed but from others there is a response.
  • All services required for active directory to work are up and running (checked Microsoft documentation)
  • When server starts the auto selected profile is "public network", so we restart the NLA service to get the "domain network" profile (same results after testing)

Your suggestions will be welcome.

Best Answer

Have you tried to access the shares locally? Like \localhost\netloon and sysvol, also try with the IP Address, if the server can access itself without problems that means the error is not in the services, also some times when you can't seem to figure out the results of your testing consider hardware (NIC, cables, switch) failure, and even some things that are everything but obvious, I remember a time when I had to uninstall the TCP/IP stack from a NIC and reinstall to get it to work, you can also try DCDiag to see if there is any problem detected, I suggest using it with the verbose option, hope that helps, regards.

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