Causing ‘File Not Found’ type errors in certain operating system / network environments.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This information is for experienced IT technicians only as it involves settings in highly sensitive areas of the Windows operating system. Changes in these areas, by an inexperienced person, could lead to catastrophic failure of your computer systems
SMB2 Foxpro Data Conflicts –
Note from IT Engineer investigating POS crashing issues:
“Our pos had random crashing, it turns out it’s the new SMB2 protocol that came out with Vista and how it affects FoxPro in the network sharing environment. I installed this small MSI registry patch and ever since we have had no issues with pos.”
http://www.alaska-software.com/fixes/smb2/overview.shtm#download
SMB2 Workstation Cache Configuration
Description
To avoid data loss or data corruption when using Windows Vista or Windows 7 clients in a network where data is stored on a Windows Server 2008 or higher, the SMB2 file meta data cache needs to be reconfigured. The proper configuration is automatically applied by the MSI package available here.
Details
With the advent of Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a new network protocol (SMB2) to optimize file sharing for WAN and low bandwidth and high latency scenarios. To optimize these types of file access scenarios, Microsoft performed design decisions which lead to the inability of the new SMB2 protocol to handle cache coherency of file meta information such as the file size, the last update time and whether the file actually exists on the server ("file not found" status).
As a result of this design decision made by Microsoft, the SMB2 protocol with its default configuration breaks any application relying on shared, concurrent data access. It is therefore absolutely required to reconfigure the SMB2 cache of the local workstation to not cache file meta information.
Alaska Software provides to its customers and their end-users an MSI installation package which reconfigures the SMB2 cache accordingly. This MSI package needs to be executed on any Vista and Windows 7 workstation in a network to ensure that no data loss or data corruption occurs when accessing files concurrently.
- Applicable to Vista and higher
- Installation is denied on other machines
- Package does not work on Win95/Win98/WinMe
This package creates and modifies values under the following registry key:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters
The following registry values are created and set to zero:
- FileInfoCacheLifetime
- FileNotFoundCacheLifetime
- DirectoryCacheLifetime
Download/Run
To execute: Click here and push the "Run" button.
To download: Press the right mouse button and choose: "Save target as" to store the MSI package on your local hard disk. It may be executed later on on the same or another computer by double-clicking the MSI file in Windows Explorer.
Uninstallation
To uninstall the package, go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Uninstall Program. Choose "Uninstall" for the "Alaska Software SMB2 cache configuration" entry. The uninstallation process will remove the added entries from the registry. Therefore, the original default settings of 10 respectively 5 seconds cache lifetime are used by the workstation thereafter.
File Not Found type Errors
The following information was relayed from a site specifically investigating issues with Synergy workstations on Windows 10, and server on Server 2012 R2:
Relevant links:
http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~ErrorReadingFile
and
The IT Technician involved advised:
I have changed mapped drive policy to “Update” (previously set as Recreate) - an interesting one and I can clearly see how that could cause an issue!
This may also be the solution to a similar problem another customer has been suffering with an MYOB application.