Network-related Beachballs After Sleep--Suggestions?

[Makosuke]

I'm in the final stages of switching the office I administer from a bunch of locally stored data and filesharing on to a single, centralized Xserve data volume mounted on every computer. In all, the transition has gone very smoothly, save a few complaints of things being slow when saving very large (mostly 10+MB PowerPoint) documents, which of course you can just work on locally to speed up.

I have, however, been having one recurring problem that I haven't worked out yet: After some (not all, apparently) of the computers go to sleep, applications with documents stored on the server open will sometimes stall unkillably with a beachball. Sometimes it doesn't seem to happen, some applications (Eudora most notably) will eventually recover, but sometimes it requires a restart, if not a hardware-based reset.

It seems to be a fairly straightforward; the network connection takes a moment to come up after sleep, during which time the mounted server volume is unavailable and apps SBOD. But where you'd expect it to either give the "Server not responding" error or just kick in after a bit, sometimes it doesn't and things permanently freeze (not even a kill -9 will work).

What do other folks who use server volumes do to get around problems like this? Is there something obvious to turn on or off (other than sleep)? Some other way of mounting network volumes to avoid these problems?

Hardware involved is a 100BT network, Yikes G4 or Quicksilver G4 towers, and an XServe, all running 10.3.9, connecting using AFP over TCP/IP (AppleTalk on or off doesn't make a difference).

Help!

 

[superbovine]

i've had the same problem, but in a different way. I don't think this will help, but http://kismac.binaervarianz.de/ has software that lets you leave wifi connected while your notebook goes to sleep. however, you are using ethernet. there is probably third-party or programmatic way of doing it.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, thanks for the suggestion. That is an interesting app, and although it doesn't help in my case at all it does at least point to where the problem exists.

Here's an additional thing that I've noticed; most of the computers having problems are older Macs, and all are running on 100BT. I do, however, have one Mac (a dual 1GHz Quicksilver) connected to the same server in the same way via 1000BT. For whatever reason it takes quite a bit longer for the network to come back up after sleep (probably 30 seconds), but unlike the other computers it actually does give the "Server not responding... Disconnect?" dialogue instead of just beachballing. In an additional bit of oddness, when the network comes back up the dialogue won't disappear--you need to hit Disconnect and reconnect to get control back.