Wednesday 8 December 2010

CaseWare Working Papers – Disabling SMB2

We have a small 5 seat accounting firm that is having nothing but grief with their CaseWare Working Papers 2010 accounting application.

We had them update their systems to CaseWare’s R7 update but that did nothing to improve the product’s stability.

So, we disabled SMB2 on their relatively new SBS 2008 setup.

image

We had a bit of a nervous time after making the change and rebooting the server. It took almost 10 minutes for us to see the logon request!

This particular server has an Intel Remote Management Module 3 installed so we were able to make the change and watch the entire reboot session as though we were sitting right in front of the server.

Now that the change has been made we will be monitoring their network performance especially when they are working on their own client’s larger QuickBooks files we believe that QB performance will be a pain point once SMB2 is disabled.

We are working on a NAS based solution for our larger clients if we cannot get any kind of stability out of Working Papers 2010 as disabling SMB2 would take too high a cost in network performance.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

6 comments:

Unknown said...

CaseWare's notes on this subject can be found here: http://www.caseware.com/support/caseknowledge/file-corruption-when-using-windows-vista-windows

Also Microsoft has a hotfix to SMB2 which can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028965

Anonymous said...

I also found problems with both LabTech and CommitCRM having database corruption until I turned off SMB2 on Server 2008 R2.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

CaseWare,

The link you reference was posted in the link to the previous blog post CaseWare Working Papers 2010 - Network File Locations Errors.

The hotfix is known, however the network errors our accounting clients are seeing have nothing to do with multiple users accessing the same file on a shared folder. _Any_ CaseWare Working Papers 2010 file set on a Server 2008+ file server tosses up those errors.

When commenting to one of our accounting clients that has their backend on SBS 2003, are looking to migrate to SBS 2011, and are running CaseWare Working Papers 2009 we both figured that maybe staying with Working Papers 2009 would avoid the problem post migration.

Daniel,

We are seeing other products out there with some issues when the product's data resides on an SMB2 share.

The big question that needs to be answered is: What is common across all of the products experiencing issues with an SMB2 based server setup?

Somehow we are betting on some legacy components contained in the software products that cannot cope with shares that are SMB2 enabled.

We have seen this situation before.

Philip

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

BTW CaseWare,

If that hotfix was truly relevant, that is it actually fixed the problem, then why is it not Step 1 in the noted CaseWare Knowledgebase article?

Philip

Anonymous said...

Hope this thread is still being monitored... has this registry tweak been done by anyone on SBS 2011?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Yes and it brought network performance down significantly.

We don't see the problem with CW 2011 as far as I can tell.

Philip