Server 2003 Filesharing cuts out

[moebius 0]

I am having a rather strange problem which I can't seem to find anything on google about.

 

I have a server 2003 (sp1) box configured as a domain controller, which also has multiple harddrives for file storage and sharing.

 

The client PC's are either XP SP2 machines or SuSE Linux 10.1 . I have similar problems with both.

 

I have all my music & videos on the server, and use Windows media player on XP and amaroK on SuSE, both with their libraries indexing directly off the folder shares. At seemingly random intervals, the share seems to partly cut out - I say partly, because in SuSE the music pauses for about 5 secs, then continues, and in XP, windows media player jumps to the next track in the list.

 

This also affects copying large files across the network - in XP I get the message "Cannot copy xx: The path is too deep" after (seemingly) random intervals, and in SuSE the copying pauses for about 5 secs, then continues (it appears that SuSE has better resuming capabilities than XP, but this is beside the point).

 

I have checked the group policy on the server and changed the timeout on file sharing to be 0 (share does not time out), and also tried mapping the share as a network drive on the XP client. Nothing seems to be helping.

 

Any ideas?

[clutch 1]

Does the path, including the share, have more than 255 characters in it? That's pretty easy see when using really long filenames in music files (artist - album - trackname - track#.mp3).