Windows 11 not connecting ethernet network until logged in

[sedrosken]

This is frankly rather bizarre. I've installed 11 to a separate drive in my main to see if the Arc drivers are any better on it, so I'm using my X540 10GbE LAN card. It may be worth noting that I had to forcibly install drivers meant for Windows 10 for it as the setup program Intel provides won't detect the card on 11 -- presumably it's not supported.

I have a scheduled task that mounts my NFS share to Z: on startup and it's failing because network isn't available at startup, it's not available until a few seconds after I log in. I can leave it at the login screen as long as I want, it doesn't ever connect until I'm logged in. I expect this kind of problem from WLAN under Windows XP, but not from Ethernet on 11. I thought it might be that I configured the static IP in the Windows Settings app rather than in the device properties under IPv4, so I unset it in Settings and reset it there, but it doesn't seem to have helped. For context, I need the static IP on my workstation because unless I want to open up the entire share to the entire subnet, I have to get more specific. If I have to, I suppose I could exploit DHCP reservations and just move the IP in /etc/exports to whatever I reserve for it -- 10.254.0.21 is outside my DHCP range, after all. That's .100-.254.

Anyone have an inkling as to what might be going on here? Google's getting more and more useless -- it gave me a ton of results for Ethernet not working at all, but that's not my issue. Once I'm logged in, it's fine.

 

[Mercutio]

Under what context does the task run? Is it a task triggered by login with your user account login.
There are some stupid tricks you can play, like having it run in the "on startup" trigger off the Administrator login (that won't map a drive for you but it will trigger without your login) instead of your specific account or adding
timeout /t 30
as the first parameter of the batch file you're trying to schedule.

 

[sedrosken]

Under what context does the task run? Is it a task triggered by login with your user account login.
There are some stupid tricks you can play, like having it run in the "on startup" trigger off the Administrator login (that won't map a drive for you but it will trigger without your login) instead of your specific account or adding
timeout /t 30
as the first parameter of the batch file you're trying to schedule.

It's set to run at system startup under the SYSTEM user context. It isn't that it never mounts, it eventually does, but a thing I have set to run at startup is depending on some data living there and yells at me and makes me manually open the file if it isn't available when it starts. I could probably just get around that by opening a local copy, but I'm deathly afraid I'll make a change and forget to sync it up.

 

[Mercutio]

Does it have to run under NFS? Could you access the same thing from SMB?

 

[sedrosken]

The way I have my server set up is that my SMB implementation is a separate VM accessing the shares on the original server through NFS**, so doing that adds considerable overhead and roughly halves network performance. That isn't an issue for a 1Gbps connection, but for 2.5, 5, or 10, it massively cuts down on top speed. I could set up Samba on the actual NAS VM, but that'd make my setup even more confusing, and NFS works completely fine for my clients that aren't Windows, which actually greatly outnumber the Windows clients at this point.

**: The Samba VM is version-controlled so that I never lose SMBv1 support and leave my legacy clients out in the cold. They've been threatening to drop it for years now.

 

[Mercutio]

Since Windows is creating the problem here, perhaps you could use something like rsync between the two VMs involved and let Windows access it through SMB that way? Is this the only pain point in current operations?

 

[sedrosken]

I'll probably end up biting my tongue and just setting up an identical copy of Samba on the original NAS VM since NFS is being such a stinker for me. It's also just generally pretty terrible latency wise -- it really loves locking up my file explorer windows in ways my SMB shares never did. Part of the reason I upgraded to 11 was that I hoped that might have been fixed -- it did that bit just as much on 10.

 

[Mercutio]

A zillion years ago, I remember that I had a customer that was transitioning off traditional (HPUX) workstation systems to Windows 2000. We tried four or five commercial NFS implementations before we found one that more or less worked. Everything we tried did something weird/dumb at least some of the time, and a lot of the time the weirdness didn't happen until the servers were under load. The eventual fix was to migrate the back end storage systems to NetApp, but if I remember right, we found that the Windows NFS client completely useless and eventually settled on the NFS software made by Intergraph, which is definitely a thing that doesn't exist any longer.

 

[sedrosken]

That tracks with MS's general philosophy of our way or the highway. It's probably a project for the weekend.