[geeks] Windows 7 File & Printer Sharing Nightmare

[Nick B]

I'm going to guess winbind, but I tend to blame winbind when normal diags
fail me on windows.
Nick

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 5:36 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I give you due warning, some of you may vomit when you read the setup we
> have here. It's not the best, I'm aware.
>
> I have a real doozy. Windows 7 File and Printer sharing on a peer-to-peer
> LAN, all machines are running Windows 7 Pro, the majority are 64-bit, a
> couple are 32-bit. Password protected sharing is OFF on all machines (yes,
> yes I know) and they are all in the same Workgroup.
>
> The issue is we share printers from 4 PCs to the rest of the LAN (about a
> dozen PCs total) mostly due to desk space limitations. At random (as in not
> every day, or on every PC), or due to some factor I can't see, some PCs
> refuse point blank to talk to each other via Windows sharing. Printing
> breaks and everyone starts complaining.
>
> I tried all the usual diagnostics, pings are fine, TCP/IP seems to work
> okay, there's no loss of Internet access to anything else that would
> suggest an infrastructure failure. We don't use managed switches or filters
> inside the LAN that would cripple Windows traffic specifically and, as
> stated, some days it works just fine. It's also an issue that never cropped
> up running XP, the first time I saw it was between XP and 7 and I assumed
> it was just version niggles. It appears it's a problem with Windows 7. It's
> not a 64-bit vs. 32-bit driver issue either, as 64-bit to 64-bit machine
> comms are failing the majority of the time.
>
> I'm about to hulk smash something. The only suggestions I've seen is that
> using no-password sharing in Windows 7 and up is unreliable. Any
> experiences?
>
> --
>
> Mark Benson
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