Hi,
I ran into yet another weird issue. To prevent too much roaming, we redirected some folders under which My Documents. They are redirected to the users homedrive\Documents, which reside on a 2008R2 Failover Cluster. Users work from a 2008R2 Remote Desktop Server. Now when a user receives a .zip file, or downloads one, containing multiple files in it, and opens it with the Explorer ZIP functionality, things get weird. When the zip opens it shows the normal explorer window we all know. The user can either drags/drops or copy/pastes the files to their any folder like his desktop, other network drives he has, even his homedrive but NOT his 'My Documents' folder, which actually resides on his homedrive. If he wants to extract the files there only a few of the files show up. Sometimes after a refresh one or 2 more show up, but not all of them. If the user unzips the files to a folder on any other place, and copies them to the My Documents folder it works fine.

So in short:

Users cannot directly copy/paste or drag/drop from a zip file to their My Documents folder if that's redirected to a share.



I investigated this a bit and found the following:

- When the My Documents folder is NOT redirected to a share but a local drive (or not at all - hence going to the local profile) everything works fine.
- Using a zip with only some 0-byte textfiles I was able to trigger it only once in about 100 tries.
- When I use a zip file with 33MB when extracted in 9 files, I can trigger it almost every time.
- Using Windows 7 SP1 x64 as a client with redirected My Documents the same happens (basically the same OS ofcourse)

I completely reinstalled my testenvironment just to test this and the very same happens there. The only changes after the fresh setup of the OS'es is one GPO that only does that My Documents redirect, and besides that the machines are patches through Windows Updates. So no additional software or anything is installed.

Can anyone that has My Documents redirected try that in their environment? Is there any hotfix for this available?

Hi,

I have done a test with the same settings on my PC (not Failover Cluster). I created a domain user called test and redirected user folders under a shared folder \\servername\homedrive on a Windows server 2008 R2. Then I using the test user logon another Windows server 2008 R2 and copy a zip folder with 50MB to the 'My Documents' folder, however, there is no issue and can save the zip folder.

If I have misunderstanding, please feel free to let me know. Would you please provide detail information about this error when you copy a zip folder to the 'My Documents' folder?

Regards,

It's not about copying the zip file itself, but it's contents. If you open a zip file with Windows own ZIP integration (ie not installing winrar or anything like that) you'll get an explorer window with the contents of the zip. You copy/paste directly from that. Copy/pasting directly from that zip to the redirected homedrive gives me the error. I can upload my sample zip file if you want, although I could reproduce it with any zipfile I threw at it.

Hi,

I open the zip file and copy its contents to the 'My Documents' folder, then there is still no issue. Maybe you could provide a screenshot and more detailed error message about your question.

Regards,

This screenshot shows it all actually. I opened the zip file, selected everything, copy / pasted it into a folder in 'My Documents' and presto, only a few files came over. Sometimes it works ok, most of the times it doesn't.

The My Documents is redirected to H:\Documenten (dutch for documents) which is a network share on a cluster. Extracting the files to any other location on H: works fine.

As said in my testenviroment I don't have cluster, but just a 2008R2 file share. When I redirect my documents there the very same happens.

The zip file I use to test is available from here. Note that any other zip file I tested behaves the same. In my testenvironment there is absolutely nothing installed on top of vanilla Windows except the Windows Updates. No antivirus or anything of that sort.

Hi,

Please check if you have Enabled the Limit profile size policy setting which is available in the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles. If so, please Not Configured it to see if the issue still exists.

This policy sets the maximum size of each roaming user profile and determines the systems response when a roaming user profile reaches the maximum size.

For more detailed information, please refer to the article below:

Assigning Profile and Disk Quotas
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781173(v=ws.10).aspx

Thanks, but as stated in my testenvironment no other policies than the actual redirection are set. Diskspace / quotum is not an issue; if that were the case it wouldn't work when first extracting the files somewhere else and then copy them to my documents. In addition sometimes it DOES work, implying GPO's are ok (assuming they always work the same...).

Hi Robert,

Did you get anywhere with this?  I am experiencing the same thing when attempting to unzip files to a server 2008r2 share.

Thanks.

I have 2 similar problems

1) we had a shared drive located on an EMC SAN in our data center that was moved to a NAS system.  

Within days batch script jobs started failing - and notepad++ failed to keep files on the share drive open - other instances occurred where it might seem that the NAS had gone offline (timeouts, file not found errors,  etc).

Our solution was to move the contents of the shared drive back to another SAN (this data center was over 400 miles away).  So our latencies are higher and yet all those oddball errors went away.

2) The 2nd issue is described on another page I started for "Zips failing on a single Win2008R2 server (one of many)".  Basically a daily job fails half the time now - this job should zip 7 backup files - using winrar - but can fail to find 1 or more of the files.  The same job works fine on 2 other win2008r2 servers  and 4 other win2003 servers.  when the problems started in August it occurred once every week or two.  Now the job fails 3-5 days of the week.  

If you are still working this issue and haven't given up after a couple of months time, could you reply back with the root share permissions?  IE the permissions on the directory at \\servername\share.

I had some craziness dealing with the root directory permissions affecting installs on my local system.  Apparently windows 8 did some file space checking and it couldn't read that directory and failed.  Domain Admins was the only permission on that directory and after I added authenticated users with some minimal permissions it then succeeded.

Hi. Yes, we are still working ont his. However, I set myself a threshold of number of active MS tickets. I spend 90% of my time working on mostly MS bugs, and that's more than enough.

I was now ready to file a prosupport ticket for this. But for some reason I cannot trigger it anymore. We have had a lot of hotfixes in the meanwhile again, as well as regular patches through WSUS. Maybe it got fixed.

@DennisAston, permissions is not the key here. While I have seen some applications indeed needing some permissions at the root of the share, I could trigger this issue even as domain admin, with full permissions.

Can anyone try again after the latest Windows Updates? If your issues still persist I can share a list of hotfixes we have installed, maybe it helps some people.

Hi. Yes, we are still working ont his. However, I set myself a threshold of number of active MS tickets. I spend 90% of my time working on mostly MS bugs, and that's more than enough.

I was now ready to file a prosupport ticket for this. But for some reason I cannot trigger it anymore. We have had a lot of hotfixes in the meanwhile again, as well as regular patches through WSUS. Maybe it got fixed.

@DennisAston, permissions is not the key here. While I have seen some applications indeed needing some permissions at the root of the share, I could trigger this issue even as domain admin, with full permissions.

Can anyone try again after the latest Windows Updates? If your issues still persist I can share a list of hotfixes we have installed, maybe it helps some people.

[edit]

I just tested in my testsetup and there is issue is still present despite the same hotfixes being installed. I'll investigate a bit further and file another case.

[edit2]
now it seems to happen on ALL network drives, not isolated to homedrives. I'll log a ticket today.

• Edited by Robert Gijsen Tuesday, February 25, 2014 2:10 PM

I have raised a ticket for this, and quite quickly got a workaround which came from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686200(v=ws.10).aspx. When the DirectoryCacheLifetime is disabled by setting it to 0 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\Parameters, the issue is not seen anymore.

However, in my test setup I am only using two fresh copies of 2008R2, without any third party software.In addition this only happens on SMB2 shares, not on SMB1 or SMB3 shares. A cache serves a purpose, and just disabling it to me is a workaround rather than a fix. I did not accept this solution and have to go to all Microsofts bureaucratic cr@p again to get a real fix.

In my opinion if disabling a specific SMB2 cache at costs of performance bypasses this issue which occurs on Windows 2008R2s own built in programs, the cache is not working correctly. Besides that we all know SMB performance is not good anyway, especially with small files were tadaaa... a cache comes in handy.

So I'll keep you updated whenever a real fix will be created.