NT 4.0 workstation users are complaining that all of their drive letters are getting used up by what appears to be a rampant network-drive mapping situation. For example, normally I have three shares network-mapped. Lately, ceetain people are complaining that one of their shares get's remapped a number of times to take up all the drive letters (except drive letter Z). So suddenly they have 25 network-mapped drives. Why? How? -Ed Ed Sanborn (978) 691-6496 Northchurch Communications Inc. 5 Corporate Drive Andover, MA. 01810 Fax (978) 691-6300 http://www.northchurch.net <http://www.northchurch.net/> -------------- next part -------------- HTML attachment scrubbed and removed
I have (or had) the same situation, did not seem to be related to Samba at all. The drive got remapped again (and again), when I had a shortcut pointing to a file on network, and I opened that file. Also the shortcut was modified (by OS, check the properties) to point to new drive mapping. I changed shortcut to read-only and it stopped hapenning. Walter. -----Original Message----- From: Sanborn, Ed [mailto:esanborn@northchurch.net] Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 1999 1:33 PM To: Multiple recipients of list SAMBA Subject: Weirdness NT 4.0 workstation users are complaining that all of their drive letters are getting used up by what appears to be a rampant network-drive mapping situation. For example, normally I have three shares network-mapped. Lately, ceetain people are complaining that one of their shares get's remapped a number of times to take up all the drive letters (except drive letter Z). So suddenly they have 25 network-mapped drives. Why? How? -Ed Ed Sanborn (978) 691-6496 Northchurch Communications Inc. 5 Corporate Drive Andover, MA. 01810 Fax (978) 691-6300 http://www.northchurch.net <http://www.northchurch.net/>
>> NT 4.0 workstation users are complaining that all of their drive letters are getting used up by >> what appears to be a rampant network-drive mapping situation.>> For example, normally I have three shares network-mapped. Lately, >> ceetain people are complaining that one of their shares get's remapped >> a number of times to take up all the drive letters (except drive letter Z). >> So suddenly they have 25 network-mapped drives.Have you installed Service Pack 4 recently? There's a bug in it that stops network drives being unmapped under certain circumstances. If you have a program that tries to find a free drive letter before connecting a drive, it might use a new letter each time because it was unable to release the previous letter (this happened to us just after installing SP4). Hope that helps. Nick Parker Berger-Levrault, France
On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Sanborn, Ed wrote:> For example, normally I have three shares network-mapped. Lately, > ceetain people are complaining that one of their shares get's remapped > a number of times to take up all the drive letters (except drive letter Z). > So suddenly they have 25 network-mapped drives.Sounds like a problem we had. Microsoft's *.LNK files (shortcuts) have a 'feature' known as 'shortcut tracking' whereby a shortcut will save the UNC path to a file as well as the traditional drive-letter-path. However, it the UNC path that the drive letter is mapped to differs from what the shortcut remembers, it will map the OLD UNC path to the next available drive letter and use that. The next time around it does the same thing until all of the driver letters are used up. I need to mention here that our clients are all (OK, most) Win95, but we found a solution. Microsoft provided a program called SHORTCUT.EXE with the W95 Resource Kit which can modify certain properties of a shortcut. One of these properties is 'Shortcut Tracking', which I have since turned off on our clients (well, on the shortcuts anyway). I wrote a Perl(32) script which used SHORTCUT.EXE to properly labotamize all of the users' shortcuts so that they blindly use a drive letter regardless of where it's mapped to. Unfortunately, I don't know if such an animal exists for NT, since the shortcut files tend to be different under NT (I think the actual binary structure of the *.LNK files is different, but I haven't had time to find out for sure). Since our NT population is low and they are considered 'development workstations' it has not become much of an issue. Hope this helps. If you like a copy of my labotamizer script let me know. [Darrin] -- "I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious." - A. Einstein Darrin M. Gorski, Research Computer Systems Network Support Scientific Research Laboratories, Ford Motor Company Internet: dgorski@ford.com | Tel/Fax: +1 (313) 248-3753