Applied losing network connection

[Lynne Desrochers]

I recently had two people start working in my office that are working with an online sharing program, syncedtool from Anchor. They wanted to scan at their desktops directly to the syncedtool web site. We are using an outside tech to manage this. They are only here a few days a week. It's just getting started this week and they haven't really scanned much.
This week, i've been having people get stuck in applied and getting the "server not available" error in various areas of applied. It wasn't everyone, so I haven't been able to pinpoint it. Today around 10:00 am 13 people got those same error messages again. When I asked if anything was scanned today it was right around 10:00 when everyone got the errors.
I want to blame the scanning directly to the website. I know that in our remote office we have them scan to the local desktop, then copy it over to the network. We do not have them scan directly to the network drive.
Anyone have any thoughts, suggestions or input?

[Mark]

Think I'd need a little more info about the environment and the workflow process to troubleshoot this.

Are these remote users that are scanning at their desk, t hen transferring over the network to a server before uploading?

What is this syncedtool?  Is there a VPN involved or anything like that?

[Lynne Desrochers]

The ones using the synced tool are working here on my network. They are scanning from their desktops directly to the syncedtool website, so we mapped a drive to the syncedtool website and have the scanner pointing there.
No VPN, it seems to me like DropBox. just a bunch of files that you can access from anywhere.

[Mark]

Ok, got it.  I did Google it too and I agree it is like a dropbox type thing.

So, who is losing network connection when this happens? People in the same office as the syncedtool users, remote users..?

[Lynne Desrochers]

Other people in the office. The people using the syncedtool are not using Applied. I just found two errors from yesterday and I was able to find scans around the same times.

[Mark]

Ok, so it's people in the same physical location and this is the same physical location of the TAM server?

And also, are these all virtual desktops we are talking about of physical local machines?

[Lynne Desrochers]

all people in the same location and all have physical local machines.

[Mark]

I wonder if this might be related to the amount of traffic on a switch or switchport then.  Can you make any kind of relation as to where the machines and server are connected to a switch?

Maybe there is a bottleneck.  Do you have multiple switches?  Is the TAM server connected to one switch and BOTH the sync users AND the TAM stations losing network connection connected to a switch OTHER than the switch the TAM server is connected to?

Also, what is/are the switch(es) in play here?

Lastly, is the error they are seeing coming from TAM?

[Lynne Desrochers]

The error is from Tam, various areas depending on where they are at the time. ex: An error occurred while displaying list., then under desc: Could not read at least 8 bytes at offset 0 in "F:\TAM\CLIENT.NDX": Error 64. the specified network name is no longer available.
and other various ones that end with network name is no longer available.

[Jeff Zylstra]

If a network connection is being lost, I would hope that an error message would be logged somewhere, like event viewer.  Have you looked at the System log in event viewer for both the machines that lose the connection, and also the machines that are doing the scanning?  I'm also wondering if there aren't errors in the Event Viewer - Applications for both the machines that are scanning, and also the machines losing a connection.

I don't know if there is a third party utility that could analyze the traffic patterns and log errors or conflicts, but it would seem to be useful in this situation.  Don't know if Wireshark or something similar would help or not.

[Mark]

If only TAM is reporting the error, I wouldn't suspect the full network connection is going down, i.e. the balloon isn't popping up saying that a "network cable is unplugged".

I would almost suggest it could be a DNS issue, but I'm leaning more towards the switch at this point.

See what kind of relationship you can determine with the switch as I mentioned in my previous post.  Maybe you need to create a bigger trunk between two switches, or just move some things around to even out pressure on one port.  Something to that effect.  QoS even prioritizing traffic to the IP address of the TAM server or limiting bandwidth to the sync program.

[Lynne Desrochers]

Only Applied is showing the error, but their email is on their local C drive and if the website they were viewing skipped a beat or two they might not notice. There aren't many other things that are specifically on the server that need the constant connection like applied. Am I off base in that thinking?

[Mark]

Is Citrix in the picture at all?

[Lynne Desrochers]

I do have two people on citrix and they got an applied error, but it also could have been that the citrix is on the same switch.
I think I'm going to test out the scanning tonight at 5 and see if I can re-create the issue.

[Jeff Golas]

I'd be looking at a few things:

Bandwidth - is it being chewed up? (I'd be willing to bet that dropbox-like system is really p2p thats STORING things on your systems as well as letting you store elsewhere)

Are the computers running this software the ones having issues? Could also be running out of network resources (again prob tons upon tons of connections getting opened, do a netstat -a).

Router - even if you have the bandwidth, if it suddenly spikes huge, the processor in whatever router/switch you're running may not be able to handle it.