I have a Netware 4.2 server and the users are randomly losing connection to the network. If you look at connections in the client, it still shows them as authenticated. It still shows them as being logged on in "Monitor" on the server but if you look in one of the mapped network drives in My computer, there is nothing there. Networked printers are not accessible either. I have turned on Watchdog monitoring on the server and it does not show the users as being kicked off by watchdog. I have used a network observing software to check for collisions and there are none. I have captured packets from the workstations and see nothing wrong there either. Anyone have any ideas??

We discovered a similar fault in a NetWare 4.11 environment. In our case we were able to trace the problem to TCP/IP packet loss on the LAN due to a faulty LAN card on board a Win98 PC that was being used as the network gateway for simple proxy server software (not our implementation I hasten to add!!!!!). We tested this by running continuing pings to each workstation from the server that was having an issue and vice versa. When we tried the Win98 PC it fell over immediatlety, all PC's suffered packet loss talking to it - including the netware box. Happy hunting

We had a very similar problem - Solved by taking netbui off the protocols - problem occured when we seperated from a large network to smaller system - but still 100+ machines. Try it and see ! - we only discovered problem as it was shut down and when all factory came back pc's kept ramdonly and routinely loosing network drives.