Nick2004

Both servers are in the same forest and in fact domain. All clocks are correctly synchronised at least within a few seconds. I have not loaded SP1 as yet but this may be worth looking at. The fault ocurred again today I could ping the VPN user by name but not browse their PC. If I tried to browse the PC the server would wait for about a minute then report a permission error reporting that I do not have sufficient priviliges to access this machine. After a reboot I could browse the VPN user with no problem.

I tried the net time \\my_workstation /query sntp and it responded that this computer was not configured to use any sntp server is this ok? All clocks still appear to sync to the server. I also tried running the command against the servers and they appear to be set to time.microsoft.com ? Should all the servers sync to the PDC emulator?

Now there is something I had not thought about, how can you confirm the server or client clock is in sync with each other? The VPN users never have any problems with the fileserver which holds all the operations master roles.

No firewalls other than the watchguard soho and one end and a watchguard x700 at the other. This happens to all VPN users at once.

Hi - thanks for the suggestion I don't think this will help as it happens to all 5 VPN users at the same time and we created each machine at different times (over a period of months). One of them visits the main office at least once a week but only has problems (same as the other guys) over the VPN every 2 - 3 weeks. Could a damaged TCP/IP protocol stack do it? As I can ping the remote users and they can ping me are there any other TCP/IP diagnosis tools I could used to further investigate?

We have two servers running 2003 server (not SP1 yet) one is used for file sharing printer sharing and hosts the office antirus. The other is running exchange 2003 with email antivirus software oh and both servers are running server protect anti virus software. Both servers are running A/D and are DNS servers the fileserver also has WINS server configured. The Exchange server also has RRAS configured for a single modem to allow one of our sales guys to log in and retrieve his email. We also have 5 remote offices all linked via VPN this is firewall to firewall VPN the VPN users are allowed complete pass through the firewall i.e. at the office end there are no limitations. The problem we have is that every two to three weeks all the VPN users loose sight of the server running exchange. It its really strange we can ping each other either by name or IP address with no problems. But if I try to browse the VPN computer from the email server the connection times out with a permissions or semaphore error. On the other end of the VPN the user cannot access the email server from Outlook, but can also ping the emailserver. The fileserver has never failed in this way. Why could this run perfectly for two to three weeks then fail? The only way out is to reboot the email server which I don't like doing and still indicates we have a problem. HELP!!!