Windows Shares dropping

mpitcavage · May 8, 2006, 2:27 PM

I have a basic pfSense installation (BETA3) on a wrap board.

Windows shares on my NAT clients drop when copying large files from my win2003 AD server.

This seems like a problem somebody else should be having? Any help where to start diagnosing the issue would be appreciated

Here's the only reference I've see to the issue:
http://groups.google.com/group/lucky.openbsd.misc/browse_thread/thread/a91f60e1429565d7/f9af91a7fa46c2c8

mpitcavage · May 10, 2006, 8:07 PM

Argh! I've set up m0n0wall and pfSense on the WRAP board, then moved to NAT on my existing Slackware Linux server, all these solutions have the same problem.

The only new information I can add is that NAT works great with one or two users (my test environment). As soon as I put it out to production (read: simultaneous access), the shares start dropping. I see nothing interesting via tcpdump, there's no log of the event, they just disconnect. I can reconnect immediately, then at some point in the future (30 seconds or 10 minutes, I believe it's related to when another user on the NAT accesses the same share) the share drops again.

rsw686 · May 11, 2006, 2:00 AM

I'm not sure if Windows Shares were designed to work through NAT. What about setting up a VPN from pfsense to the server.

mpitcavage · May 11, 2006, 12:23 PM

Ha! Thanks to you another quick ggogle gave me:

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/net/2005-07/0173.html

"Since windows sharing is generally a two way protocol you might find it
a little hard to work with NAT. The name resolution is one thing and the
RPC based authentication is another. "

Thanks, it's great to have a clear answer. I'm going to try that VPN solution today.