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Config Manager 2007: Distribution Manager Cannot establish connection to remote Distribution Point

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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 !