I'm sorry for your loss.
When I have seen "the specified network name is no longer available" it has either been a time out on the client or (windows) server side, or a personal firewall issue - my experience has been with the firewall features of Trend Micro's OfficeScan client, including the "reputation protection" service and the firewall driver that's added to the networking configuration.
If you don't have a firewall getting in your way, it could be something with the timeout values on the client side. Microsoft's idea of client/server connectivity is bass-ackwards from a Novell perspective. NetWare and the NetWare client have "keep alive" activity, where if a client hasn't had activity lately the server will check to see if it's still there. The intent is to keep an active session active, only killing inactive sessions if there's no response to the "are you still there" packets, for several minutes.
Microsoft does it the other way around. Both the client and the server will automatically disconnect after a period of inactivity, and cross their fingers that they can pick up where they left off through a "reconnect" process when one of them has a need to communicate with the other. In other words, their default action is to cut off the connection, then try to rebuild it if it's requested again.
I don't know how NW6.5SP7's CIFS handles timeout disconnect with reconnect request. Maybe poorly.
Are you using one protocol only on both server and client or do you have IPX/SPX running at all? That could be an issue too, since NetBios over IPX actually works better than NetBios over IP - connecting with one and attempting to reconnect with the other can freak out older Novell clients; I can imagine it might be the same with CIFS access.
When you try to shut down CIFS when this starts happening, do you use the CIFSSTOP.NCF or just manually shut down CIFS.NLM?
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by: ZENandEmailguyPosted on 2009-04-21 at 20:19:30ID: 24201203
I haven't seen the symptoms you report, but have seen the error 64. Check the sys:/etc/cifsctxs.cfg file and confirm all contexts where user accounts reside are listed. Then confirm that users have a simple password on their account.
I've not seen CIFS.NLM hang a server on a CIFSSTOP or a CIFSSTRT process. You're not trying to "unload CIFS", rather are you using CIFSSTOP.NCF?
What version of CIFS.NLM are you using? Type m CIFS* at the console to see what version.
At www.novell.com/downloads, I typed CIFS in the search box and once the screen appears, clicked the Patches tab where I find CIFS 3.25c as likely the latest version.
Lastly can you consider updating to SP8? Check out the readme and see if there are any updates to CIFS in SP8.