Archive for July 2012

Windows 7 SMB 2.0 Client doesn’t find new files until reboot

July 20, 2012, 2:58 pm

At work we had an issue where two Windows 7 Home Pre clients would not show newly created files on mapped network drive. Normal refresh wouldn’t cut it, but unmount and remount or a pc reboot would. After little of googling I found I wasn’t alone.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprogeneral/thread/947489ae-dc86-45f0-ad5e-463a62e1d59f

Even though this topic’s setup was a windows server and here at my office we use Samba 3.6.3 with SMB2.0 enabled. But the symptoms were very similar.  The finger was pointed at the new caching abilities in the SMB2.0 client. The solution was to disable DirectoryCacheLifetime on the client via a registry entry.  Here is Microsoft link for description of DirectoryCacheLifetime http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686200(WS.10).aspx

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters]
“DirectoryCacheLifetime”=dword:00000000

In my experience it seems that only Windows 7 Home Pre clients are effected, our Windows 7 Pro clients have no issues. I applied the registry entry to the Windows 7 Pro machines as well with no side effects.

Category: Networking, Windows  |  Comment