glricht
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
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- Location
- Zephyrhills, Florida
I've been fighting a weird intermittent problem for the last few months and believe I've finally found the problem and a resolution and thought others might be interested too.
(Sorry for the long post, but felt it necessary to explain the problem.)
In my shop, I have a Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit running primarily as a file server to five other PCs, three Win 7, two XP.
Ever since I switched the file server from XP Pro to Win 7, I've been having intermittent problems with the XP machines suddenly losing the ability to connect to any shared folder on the Win 7 file server.
It's not a permissions or network sharing issue because when all PCs are shut down and then sequentially brought up, all PCs can access the Win 7 file server just fine.
However, sometimes in a few hours, sometimes after a day or so, the XP machines suddenly get "unable to access" a folder. Meanwhile, the Win 7 machines can access the server just fine.
Rebooting the XP machines didn't help. But when the Win 7 file server was rebooted, the XP machines were OK again.
I checked permissions, file sharing options (etc, etc), even the old "local resources" registry error we often hit with Norton, but nothing helped.
I wrote it off as a "one day I'll figure this out" problem, but then today, I ran into the exact same problem at one of my small business customers! It was time for some serious research!
After a LOT of Google searching, I believe I've found the fix. (When I got back to the shop today, the XP machines couldn't access again, so I applied the "fix" and it appears to have worked!)
It seems that Win 7 is running into memory allocation for the shared resource (there were "srv event 2017" errors in the event log related to nonpaged pool allocations).
There's a registry update to tell Win 7 that it will be used as a file server and it changes the resource allocations accordingly.
First, make the following registry changes:
Then, restart the server (or reboot):
Here's what the values mean:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement\LargeSystemCache
1 = Maximize Throughput for File Sharing
0 = Maximize Throughput for Network Applications (default)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters\size
1 = Minimize Memory Used (default)
2 = Balance
3 = Maximize Throughput for File Sharing and Maximize Throughput for Network Applications
Here are the links to the posts I found which further describe the problem and solution:
http://serverfault.com/questions/23...-7-shared-folder-from-windows-xp-workstations
http://alan.lamielle.net/2009/09/03/windows-7-nonpaged-pool-srv-error-2017
Not sure why this change should be necessary in the first place, but it's in my bag of tricks now! I hope this helps anybody else fighting this issue.
(Sorry for the long post, but felt it necessary to explain the problem.)
In my shop, I have a Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit running primarily as a file server to five other PCs, three Win 7, two XP.
Ever since I switched the file server from XP Pro to Win 7, I've been having intermittent problems with the XP machines suddenly losing the ability to connect to any shared folder on the Win 7 file server.
It's not a permissions or network sharing issue because when all PCs are shut down and then sequentially brought up, all PCs can access the Win 7 file server just fine.
However, sometimes in a few hours, sometimes after a day or so, the XP machines suddenly get "unable to access" a folder. Meanwhile, the Win 7 machines can access the server just fine.
Rebooting the XP machines didn't help. But when the Win 7 file server was rebooted, the XP machines were OK again.
I checked permissions, file sharing options (etc, etc), even the old "local resources" registry error we often hit with Norton, but nothing helped.
I wrote it off as a "one day I'll figure this out" problem, but then today, I ran into the exact same problem at one of my small business customers! It was time for some serious research!
After a LOT of Google searching, I believe I've found the fix. (When I got back to the shop today, the XP machines couldn't access again, so I applied the "fix" and it appears to have worked!)
It seems that Win 7 is running into memory allocation for the shared resource (there were "srv event 2017" errors in the event log related to nonpaged pool allocations).
There's a registry update to tell Win 7 that it will be used as a file server and it changes the resource allocations accordingly.
First, make the following registry changes:
Then, restart the server (or reboot):
Here's what the values mean:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement\LargeSystemCache
1 = Maximize Throughput for File Sharing
0 = Maximize Throughput for Network Applications (default)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters\size
1 = Minimize Memory Used (default)
2 = Balance
3 = Maximize Throughput for File Sharing and Maximize Throughput for Network Applications
Here are the links to the posts I found which further describe the problem and solution:
http://serverfault.com/questions/23...-7-shared-folder-from-windows-xp-workstations
http://alan.lamielle.net/2009/09/03/windows-7-nonpaged-pool-srv-error-2017
Not sure why this change should be necessary in the first place, but it's in my bag of tricks now! I hope this helps anybody else fighting this issue.
Last edited:
