A duplicate name exists on the network - any ideas?

[ML.net]

Hello Folks,

Here's the situation. I have a single AD domain with 3 domain controllers
all the same network segment. The servers are named differently, for
example - server1, server2 and server3. I'm running AD integrated DNS for
the domain and the domain name is nwtraders.com (no this isn't a MS cert
question but rather in a lab setting!) I would like to map a drive from a
client to a server and use an alternate name. So instead of using

net use * \\servername\sharename (which works)

I would rather use,

net use * \\prefferedname\sharename (which reports a duplicate name exists
on the network)

All I'm doing to is creating a new A record in the DNS zone called
preferredname. For example,

nwtraders zone file:
Server1 (A) 10.0.0.1
Server2 (A) 10.0.0.2
Server3 (A) 10.0.0.3
preferredname (A) 10.0.0.1

I also tried using the local Hosts file but still same problem...

I can ping both prefferedname and server1 and get a reply with the same IP
address. Any ideas as to why this isn't working? Any ideas as to what would
work here?

Thanks in Advance, your help is appreciated,

ML

 

[Simon Geary]

A better solution might be to use DFS which would allow you to map
\\prefferedname to any folder you wanted.

 

[Marc Reynolds [MSFT]]

Hi Matt,

The following KB article explains how to get this working:

281308 Connecting to SMB Share on a Windows 2000-Based Server May Not Work
with
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=281308

Thanks,
Marc Reynolds
Microsoft Technical Support

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[T Baker]

FYI,

I was doing this no problem to a server that was at SP3. I installed SP4 and
then I started having this exact problem. I found the referenced MS article
and did the registry fix and that worked. From my perspective SP4
re-introduced this issue that was fixed in SP3.