Config Manager 2007: Distribution Manager Cannot establish connection to remote Distribution Point
Recently at a customer site I was faced with a problem in Config Manager 2007 where Distribution Manager could not connect to any remote distribution points.
Upon reviewing distmgr.log I could see the following errors listed for each Distribution Point:
Cannot establish connection to ["Display=\\SccmServer01\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=CEN"]\\SccmServer01\
Error occurred.
I restarted the Site Server and the problem disappeared, but after a couple of days the same errors were being logged again and it was no longer possible to distribute packages.
I tried to connect manaully to the remote server and recieved the following error:
Error code: 0x80070035
The network path was not found.
On further investigation I found that:
- I could ping the server
- Name resolution was working correctly
- I could connect to the ip address of the distributions points
- I could connect to the fqdn of the distribution points
Initially i thought this maybe a kerberos issue, as connecting via the IP address made an entry in the Security Event log showing that NTLM was being used. If i started KLIST.EXE under the local system account i could see that there was no kerberos ticket listed for the remote Distribution Point. At this point i took a network trace but could not see any network traffic when i tried to connect to the short name of the remote DP \\SCCMSERVER01
It turned out that the Site Server was running Windows 2008 R2 and there is a bug in Mrxsmb10.sys which caches credentials incorrectly in the SMB redirector. Installing KB2194664 fixed the problem.
You can read more about that hotfix here:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2194664
Hope this saves you a few hours troubleshooting !