I should start out by saying that I have called PSS (and will provide the
SRX if anyone wants it), however I wasn't thrilled with the answer. I
wanted to run the scenario by others to see what they might think. The post
is a bit long because I wanted to make sure to detail the steps taken thus
far. I can provide traces if anyone would like to see them.
We redirect the My Documents folder to shares on Windows 2003 server. This
summer we replaced our main file server with a new one. Since then we have
had a 20 second delay when doing certain actions. The most reproducible is
right clicking on My Documents on start menu and selectring properties. The
20 second delay happens at that point before the properties window will
open. It is reproducible everytime. If a second attempt is made
immediately it opens instantly. However if you wait about 60 seconds the
delay will happen again. It appears whatever timeout occurrs sets a flag to
not re-attempt for 60 seconds. It also happens within any open dialogs in
office applications. If the user opens a sub folder in my documents and
then attempts to move back up to root folder using the Up button the delay
occurrs as well.
I took network traces of the client and determined it was an HTTP request
that was occurring, timing out for 10 seconds and then repeating. I found
article 832161, but it wasn't excatly the same problem. This lead me to
investigate the WebClient service on the client. I found that if I simply
restarted the WebClnt service the problem would be gone until the
workstation was restarted. I did not want to change all of my clients so I
investigated it from the server side. That is when I called PSS.
Through essentially a process of elimination over 6 hours on the phone it
was determined that the Windows Firewall was indirectly causing the delay.
Since the file server did not have any other allowed services it was simply
dropping the packets to port 80 rather than responding and indicating no web
server. This caused the client to timeout rather than verifying no web
service. PSS's solution was to disable the Windows Firewall on the server.
PSS indicated that disabling the firewall was a recommended best practice.
This I find hard to believe.
To test the theory out I setup another W2K3 SP1 server and was able to
reproduce the problem. I found that if I allowed port 80 traffic through
the firewall the client would get a response and move on.
My questions are:
1. Is it best practice to disable the Windows Firewall on Windows Server
2003 servers?
2. Why is the XP client sending this port 80 traffic when attempting to
connect to a share?
3. Has anyone else seen these delays caused by the Web Client service when
XP machines are interacting with 2003 servers? If so what was done to
resolve?
4. (Beyond scope of this list possibly) What does disabliing the Web
Client service do to an XP machine? Does it cause any probems with
Frontpage?
Thanks for any help.
Brian Hoyt
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