I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 running with all Windows 7 clients and have been experiencing a connection drop on the shared data drive that lives on the server. The clients all randomly get the "Local device name is already in use" error message. I know that I don't have any drive name or computer name conflicts, yet this is happening randomly to all the clients in my network and it's happening quite often. Couple times an hour maybe to random clients.
I have made some changes recently. The biggest being that I changed the IP address of the server and all the clients, however after that change things seemed to be working well. Then I had a drive fail on the Server RAID. When I replaced the drive and began the rebuild, that's when I noticed connection dropouts. I read elsewhere that when doing a rebuild the server requires a lot of resources and may drop connections, so I did not think much of it. After the rebuild finished this problem persisted.
The server runs a DNS Server and Active Directory. The firewall (default gateway) take care of DHCP. Everything is on a gigabit switch. I have played with the NIC settings on the server to see if it may have been a routing issue. The server primary DNS is our local ISP DNS and the secondary is the loopback DNS. All the clients are configured to have the server IP and the primary DNS and the local ISP DNS as the secondary.
I have had remote sessions running to the server to try and isolate the issue and have not been able to pinpoint what it could be. One thing is that it's not just the mapped drive. The server also drops my remote session when the drive drops out as well. I have not tried to ping it during this period as the dropouts appear to be relatively quick. Usually my remote session will drop and then I can remote back in within 30 seconds or so.
My thoughts are leaning toward DNS server settings as I changed the IP address of the server. I went through most of those settings and have been unable to find anything that stands out. Name Server IP settings are all correct. I did change the auto disconnect setting on the server to -1 so that it does not disconnect any clients. I don't have enough clients that this would cause any resource issues (~8). I never had this issue before the rebuild and I'm not sure what to try next.
Any help is greatly appreciated.