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I've just setup a machine with Windows Server 2008. It hosts various services, like IIS, POP3, SMTP, Music for Squeezeboxes, VNC. All was working well for the first week or so.

One day I needed to create a mapped drive on the server, so it could access files on my workstation. Windows indicated that Network Discovery was needed, so I turned it on with the "Home / Office" option (rather than "Public").

This may be coincidence, but since that time I've been having troubles accessing various services from my main workstation (running Windows 7/64):

  • POP3 continued working correctly, but SMTP was delayed or failed entirely. (Telnet took 20 seconds to connect, but Outlook would never send messages.)
  • VNC failed entirely. I reinstalled it on the server, and now it works but feels sluggish.
  • The music web server was extremely delayed and usually failed. I tried reinstalling, and now it takes about 30 seconds to show the page name on the browser tab, and another 30 seconds to display any page contents.

Other machines on the local network seem fine, as do machines connected via the Internet.

I don't believe I changed anything on my own machine that would cause this. I considered the possibility that my anti-virus was involved, so I uninstalled AVG (commercial version), but that didn't help. I installed Norton 360 after that, and it didn't complain of viruses on my machine, and the delays remained.

Because only my machine is affected, I'm tempted to place blame there, except that I don't recalling changing anything, and reinstalling software on the server improved the situation. Therefore, there is likely something going on with the server too.

The server's firewall has all the necessary ports open, and it works fine for the other workstations (including external machines connected via the Internet), which indicates that it should be fine.

Any ideas?

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I've determined the cause of the problem. In my testing, I've been using the server's machine name, PITA2. When I tried using it's IP4 address (192.168.0.100), connections were fast again.

On my older machines I would usually add the server's name+address pair to the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Windows has become better at resolving network machine names, so I had never done that on my new workstation. When I changed the server's Network Discovery settings, I suspect that the name recognition facility was hamstrung somehow. It still figures it out eventually, but it takes a long while.

The rest of the machines are older, and still have this explicit entry in their hosts files, which is why they don't have the connection delay.

Now I need to figure out what changed on the server, so that I can change it back.

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  • You should never have to add any hostnames to the hosts - if this is what is happening then this indicates that there's something very wrong with your DNS configuration of your clients.
    – Mark Henderson
    Jul 20, 2010 at 5:54
  • Thanks for the comments. I had not made any changes to those, so I'm not sure what would be happening. Any suggestions?
    – Mike Hanson
    Aug 9, 2010 at 14:36
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    I just ran across this myself. As I understand it, It's due to an incompatibility of windows firewall with ipv6 when you have a mapped drive to the server - which is why using the ipv4 address gets around the problem.
    – sean e
    Mar 9, 2011 at 16:12

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