np. its all voodoo you know ;-)

Ok is your search domain on business network my company.local ?
Are the DNS servers listed in the range 10.139.5.XX IP range ?
ie. internal DNS servers or external DNS servers ?

Ethernet 1 is a self signed IP address ie. NO IP or routing which would be expected for a NAS directly plugged in. Having DNS servers entered here is pointless as their is no route to internet through the NAS anyway. Most NAS by default come preconfigured with an IP address.
Can you login to NAS and find this out and post a SS ? look up name of NAs and default address ;-)

Just a quick reply... really appreciate you putting the effort in to help. But I'm stuck churning ads out til wayyy later. I'll try to get answers for you tomorrow morning.

Thanks!
Dave

in your own time ;-)

We see off-site easynet.co.uk DNS-servers configured for a self-assigned IP, it presumably set from the other, DHCP-provisoned interface. So, most probably, no split horizon.

I personally think it will be Active directory windows servers on his primary interface, maybe 2 of them that forward/cache requests.

Big Dave, I'm sorry to say you're dealing with a set of issues which regrettably have not found remedies, although there are steps which may relieve some of the symptoms.

There's a passel of folks echoing your experiences with e-mail glitches, connection problems with SMB servers and with NAS devices, Active Directory network woes, ACL permissions issues, InDesign frustrations and more on the "Mavericks File Sharing Tips & Reports" page at http://www.macwindows.com/mavericks-filesharing.html.

In brief, 1.) Mavericks does not behave as well on Windows-oriented networks as did previous incarnations of OS X; and 2.) InDesign's file problems are a separate issue specific to use on Macintoshes, and unrelated to any network environment.

Hi Ambrose and Dave.

I would agree there are issues. However i have 100s of machines integrated into AD setups however there were many things that needed to be adjusted on both sides of coin and every environment is different. The key thing was shares are often setup with "change permissions" ACL many lazy windows admins have this on as it can lead to smoother running shares. This is a big no no IMHO. Coupled with Apple's SMB2 implementation being far from perfect and has caused a whole load of headaches.
I suppose at a few sites we were lucky to still have ExtremeZ-IP(AFP on windows) which on the whole is very reliable. We have had to at some sits force SMB1 connections to get things working and had to adjust shares on windows side to play nice. Gernally of course this is only when maybe 10%+ of fleet are having issues.

Firstly we do not use Apples built in Apps Mail, Contacts, Cal with Exchange.
We have been bitten so many times with different versions having quirks and updates breaking things in our Exchange environments that we only use Outlook 2011 or OWA in browser for Mac Users. This is not to say it does not work, but Apple had a habit of breaking things and the support mayhem outweighed allowing use in In-house/hosted solutions.

I am very used to integration of many platforms, many IT professionals are not as forthcoming are used to this and unfortunately windows admins can be one of the most stubborn to change/or help even when presented with solutions.

Oh and Adobe Apps are still a monumental PITA !

Indeed they are.
Anybody trying to use HSFX (the case-sensitive incarnation of HFS+) has Adobe on his
first-to-the-wall-when-the-revolution-came-list.

Seriously, how hard can it be to keep up consistent capitalisation of what's in your app-bundle?
And there is some Unix source-code, such as qmail, which requires a case-sensitive FS.

But I digress, hopefully BigDave will be able to figure that one out.

To test for AD being the problem, you could try to pull the ethernet cable on the big network.
You can do that just before leaving the office in the evening as the freezes occur without any interaction.
If the problem goes away, it's network-related.

I think it is an authorisation issue. We had one site time bomb when Adobe was down a few weeks ago. 20 people not being able to work using Adobe apps for nearly a day before we found a workaround.

I wonder how many cleverly administered sites install applications with overly zealous and error-prone licensing models using methods developped by the cracker-community.
Legally you're in the clear as you paid for the license, yet you're no longer bothered by such hard-to-debug issues.

Lol this was Creative Cloud ;-) but i have wasted at least 10% of my IT time on bad licensing ;-)