One thing that’s been constantly bugging me, as well as my wife is the fact that in general, Samba (SMB) connectivity from our Windows 7 machines is spotty at best. In general we can connect, and transfer data to and from our ZFS file server. However at seemingly random times the transfers fail, or the shares become unavailable. This is extremely frustrating especially when doing something like streaming music.

After some digging around I found the SessTimeout variable which is described as:

Determines the duration of the secondary delay used in calculating a time-out value for outstanding operations. If the redirector does not receive a response to an outstanding operation before the resulting time-out expires, it considers the operation to have failed. The value of the SessTimeout entry can be thought of as a margin for error. If there is an unexpected delay, the redirector permits the operation this extra time to complete.

Sounds promising…. So I popped up regedit on the windows workstations and added the DWORD entry SessTimeout in:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters

To a value of 300. After that no more timeout issues! Whoohoo! Finally!