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>Another thing I should have mentioned earlier - are you sure your direct connect cable is good? It should be Cat6 for gigabit Ethernet; high-quality pre-made Cat6 direct-connect cables might be hard to find. If your cabling guy made one for you I'd be a little leery, unless he's specially trained/certified for Cat6 work and has done a lot of them.
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>In general, with unusual, critical cables like that you should always have at least 1 spare, for test purposes in circumstances like this, if nothing else.

Hi Al and All. OK, the only thing we changed was that we installed a proper CAT6 cable between the 1Gb NIC's and have so far run 48+ hours without losing our connections to the DBF files on the server. I think this must have been the problem because the volume of data that we are passing up and down that cable can easily max the 1Gb NIC's and obviously the CAT5 cable was incorrect. Thanks Al and everyone else for the input.