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Today, I had a user call me with an issue. He couldn't access a Desktop shortcut that's defined by group policy. The shortcut was pointing to a shared folder on our web server (W-01). All other shortcuts on his Desktop worked fine, but all of them were pointed to the PDC (DC-01). No matter what I tried I couldn't get the shortcut to show up and the event log just said the path was inaccessible. Here's what I found out from my diagnosis:

  • Could ping W-01
  • Could ping DC-01
  • Could NOT navigate to \\W-01
  • Could navigate to \\DC-01
  • Could navigate to \\192.168.0.10 (IP of W-01)
  • Could navigate to \\192.168.1.10 (IP of DC-01)
  • DNS cache listed W-01 and DC-01 with the correct IPs
  • GUPDATE did nothing
  • Server says the user has full access effective permissions
  • Switching computers didn't help

In the end I cheated and manually created a shortcut using the IP and he was able to continue with his work, but that's not really a solution. I'm curious what I have to do to allow him access to the server using the host name (W-01) as he was able to up to yesterday.

For reference, the servers are Amazon EC2 instances of Windows Server 2012. The clients are Windows 7. There are three domains: CORP.LOCAL, A.CORP.LOCAL, B.CORP.LOCAL. The user is in A.CORP.LOCAL. We have three sites talking to Amazon VPC using VPNs. Everyone else in each of the sites can access the shortcut without issues.

Is there suggestions I can try to fix this?

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  • If everyone is able to access \\W-01 except this one user, it stands to reason there's something wrong with the user account (unsynchronized user account) or the workstation (unsynchronized workstation, bad kerberos, mis-matched date/time, etc...). Disjoin the workstation from its domain and re-add to the domain, then have the user log in, change the password, lock the workstation, then log in again, verify the time is corrrect, then run GPUPDATE /FORCE from cmd and reboot. Please report results.
    – CIA
    Feb 28, 2014 at 6:07
  • The disjoining and rejoining will be interesting since I'm in a different state than the user. Hopefully LogMeIn doesn't break on me. That being said, the user did try using a different computer with the same result so would it be an issue with how the workstations are joined? I can't imagine both workstations decided to get weird for this one user. I'm leaning more so to blame his profile. Maybe kill it from the workstations and have them re-download it from the DC? And maybe repeat with killing it on the DC as well?
    – Gup3rSuR4c
    Feb 28, 2014 at 7:45
  • Are the workstations you're troubleshooting from on the same domain as the file server? Or is there a trust set between your domains? How are your workstations connected to the domain (are they on the same network)? Is the VPN site-to-site or client-server based?
    – CIA
    Mar 1, 2014 at 19:24

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