"no network provider accepted the given network path"

I ran into a problem where I had one 2003r2 server that couldn't access the Linux samba servers but it could access the other windows server with no problems. I was using share level security in the smb.conf file. This worked fine up until about a month ago, only found out today because we needed to get something off of the backup server, which, well, since it couldn't access it, there is no backups...besides the point. Anyways. Here's the steps that DID NOT WORK

  • Reboot (should always be everyone's first answer)
  • Change netbios settings on the nic (already matched working servers, but changed anyways)
  • Change security options in group policy (they already matched the working servers, but changed anyways)
  • Upgraded samba on linux server
  • Changed settings in smb.conf to use user security instead of share.
    This would then bring up a user box (yay, something more), after putting in a valid user/pass it came up with the same error

Now the solution...

I decided the hell with it, lets do a windows update. That didn't work either.

It wouldn't let me, all of the updates failed to install with an error 0x80246007. OK, so I searched for that error and found a Microsoft knowledge base article (KB958042). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958042 and followed those instructions. After following those instructions, but before I tried to install the updates again, I decided to try the share. It worked. When I ran the batch file, I noticed it said that the BITS service was not running. Checked it, it was set to manual, so I changed that to Automatic and started it. Anyways, I hope that helps someone in the same situation I was in.