Intermittent connection issues with Tomcat

[scrumpyjak]

First up....apologies....newbie here.

I have a production environment that is using Tomcat 4.1.30 sitting on Windows 2003 and talking to a Windows 2003 DC.

Tomcat is now running fine, without error, but I have been working through a variety of issues that have sprung up following a simple reboot of one of the DC's - but I'm still left with one issue. No known changes were made to have caused the issue, but we do suspect Microsoft Updates may have triggered it.

PROBLEM: A web page will successfully be displayed by Tomcat for a period of time, but will eventually stop working with the following browser error: (We are using an Autologon filter)

jcifs.smb.SmbException: Connection timed out: connect
at jcifs.smb.SmbTransport.send(SmbTransport.java:476)
at jcifs.smb.SmbTransport.negotiate(SmbTransport.java:664)
at jcifs.smb.SmbSession.getChallenge(SmbSession.java:42)
at jcifs.http.NtlmHttpFilter.doFilter(NtlmHttpFilter.java:88)

This error will continue to occcur for a period of maybe 10 minutes, or until the Tomcat service is restarted. The wierd thing to me is that it just starts working again with no other actions.

The web.xml file has been the focus of many settings changes, but we have tried to keep it to a minimum as below:
(Only a small excerpt....)
<filter>
<filter-name>NTLM HTTP Authentication Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>jcifs.http.NtlmHttpFilter</filter-class>

<init-param>
<param-name>jcifs.smb.client.domainController</param-name>
<param-value>10.10.20.99</param-value>
</init-param>

</filter>

<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>NTLM HTTP Authentication Filter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

We suspected it was a wierd DNS issue and have changed the Tomcat server so it only knows of one DNS server - this has reduced the issue, but it still occurs.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated

Thanks
Paul