Client computers in a specific location unable to download packages from a Package Server or the process is very slow

Products

• Management Platform (Formerly known as Notification Server)

Issue/Introduction

In one location a package that is 600+mb is not getting completely downloaded from the package server for over an hour, or not at all, whereas clients in other locations are able to download it in 10 minutes.

Facts:

- The client shows (in the logs) a long stream of attempts, every few minutes to test the network speed.

Speed information for package server name unavailable or expired, tested speed at 5682715

- The pipes/band-width are the same as other locations not exhibitingthe problem.

- As a test to see if it was thottling, throttling was disable, but it didn't seem to have any effect; the problem persisted.

Cause

The ability for the clients/agent to connect to the package server was fragile at best. If the log was filtered down to just warnings and errors there were many of the following entries which pointed to the real root cause (bad NIC in package server, or a number of other connection oriented conditions):

Unable to map network drive for account 'altadmin' to '\\package server\PkgSvrHostC$\5db6c416-c0b2-46a2-a93f-f4046ee20bd8\snapshot.xml': A specified logon session does not exist. It may already have been terminated (-2147023584)

Unable to map network drive for account 'package server\username' to '\\package server\PkgSvrHostC$\5db6c416-c0b2-46a2-a93f-f4046ee20bd8\snapshot.xml': No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept (-2147024825)

Unable to map network drive for account 'Interactive User' to '\\package server\PkgSvrHostC$\5db6c416-c0b2-46a2-a93f-f4046ee20bd8\snapshot.xml': No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept (-2147024825)

Get '\\package server\PkgSvrHostC$\5db6c416-c0b2-46a2-a93f-f4046ee20bd8\snapshot.xml'  failed: UncTransfer: Failed to open source file: No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept (-2147024825)

UncTransfer: Failed to open source file: No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept. (-2147024825)

Download Snapshot failed: UncTransfer: Failed to open source file: No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept. (-2147024825)

Error while downloading package: UncTransfer: Failed to open source file: No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept. (-2147024825)

- Download failed - backing off Will try again in 3 minutes

After a while a sea of the following entries are displayed in the logs between attempts at downloading a package:

- Select: Unable to select a server. This may be because all servers are excluded, have reported more than 20 errors recently, or are not responding to speed tests

- Error while downloading package: No connection to server (-2147467259)

Another cause could be, if the package server were a non server class OS, such as Windows XP. Windows XP has a limit of 10 concurrent SMB connections. For more information about the 10 connection limit please visit the following URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314882  

Resolution

While the cause in one case was a bad NIC in the package server, there may be many reasons why connections cannot be made by clients, including configurations wherein the server is allowing only a certain number of connections and rejecting allothers;  or rejecting all connection requests altogether.

This would need to be diagnosed on the package server side.

Applies To
Notification Server 6.0.6074