Server 3 File Sharing Issues

[tekwerx]

Has anyone else experienced issues with file sharing in Mavericks Server 3 where the server never disconnects a user and shows multiple connections for the same user in the Connected Users pane? A user can only be connected to one or two shares but shows as connected 3-6 times.

It seems to be having an affect on the users' machines. They are getting beach balls during file sharing use. Typically users will open a shared file, work on it, and eventually save it. In between the time when they open it, some user's machines may sleep, while others don't. When they go to save the file, they get the beach ball. It's almost like the proper idle and sleep commands are being communicated, or the users are being disconnected from the file server while using the files without the computer knowing it.

When they get the beach ball, disconnecting the machine from the network or restarting the machine get's rid of the issue, but the file is never saved back to the server.

I have taken a look at the logs and can't seem to find anything...

 

[Mr-Stabby]

All i can say is 'me too' i'm afraid. Our college had a big problem with 'File Sharing' and the symptoms were exactly as you described. It wasn't limited to the AFP protocol either. We tried SMB too and the symptoms were exactly the same. On XServes, network performance (tested through Blackmagic Speed Test) was 20% of the speed of Mountain Lion. Pathetic.

We had no choice but to revert back to Mountain Lion Server. Annoyingly the problem with users staying connected carried on, so that seems to be a Mavericks client problem. However the problem of crashing machines/connections becoming instantly idle when saving actually did disappear, so that was at least partly a server problem. Another problem which you might have had also went away, whereby in the Mavericks Server.app you couldn't disconnect more than one user at a time in the 'Connections' tab, even if you selected multiple users. Funnily enough, even though the server is back on Mountain Lion, we connect to it with a Mavericks client using the Mavericks version of Server.app, and it actually lets us disconnect multiple users using that version, so it seems as if that problem was also yet again a Mavericks Server problem.

Like you, we couldn't find any reason in the logs for such problems. All we discovered is that after a user logged off, if you logged in as another user and went to 'Activity Monitor', you would see that the previous user was still logged into the machine and had services running. The only possible thing i think could cause it was the addition of iCloud Keychain to Mavericks. Considering we've had major issues with the Keychain in general since Mavericks appeared. But we got no further than that and frankly we were fed up of trying to work it out.

Sorry i couldn't help you more, hopefully 10.9.2 will go some way to fixing these issues and we may try again!