Question : The infamous General Network error...

Hi all,

Not sure whether to post this here, or in ASP.NET or in IIS - so i'll start here!

I've been recently getting this error message from asp.net pages on our webserver.

"System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: General network error. Check your network documentation
blah blah blah..."

I am pretty sure the network is okay.

The only thing i can think of that has occurred is that due to the installation of a new firewall, the SQL Server and Webserver now reside on separate subnets.

Could this possibly revoke the ASPNET user's ability to access the SQLServer form the Webserver??

This appears to be random.

Any ideas?

thanks,

KS

Answer : The infamous General Network error...

Guys,

Just starting to tackle this problem on our ASP.NET application, have made some inroads, including a lot of Google results for "General Network Error"+ASP.NET.

We log all the errors our application throws to a database (now THERE'S a catch 22 for you), but it has been useful as its shown on closer inspection that these errors occur a lot more frequently that we realised. Our setup? The SQL server is on the same machine as IIS on this test server, so there's little chance of it being a true network problem, although we are connecting by TCP/IP and not named pipes.

rafrancisco, your symptom of failure the first time, and success the next is one symptom of a failed connection in a connection pool - unfortunately its also a symptom of many other things I'm sure.

Questions we are currently asking are:

1) Are your connection pools behaving?
2) Are you sure that you are always tidying up your connections, in particular around datareaders (i.e. DataReader.Close, SqlConnection.Close when you are done)? We've been turning up code that is now going to fail our QA because it doesn't.
3) Are you creating your own commands (like rafrancisco's code above)? (The corollary being, are you using a database wrapper like the MS data application block)?

Saleek, not sure if any of these will start us in the right direction, but I'd love to know if you've made any progress, or if the answer to any of these is No or Not Sure.

Regards,

Andy