Mapped Network drives

[nancy]

I am using a vbs script to map network drives, via a
group policy, on roughly 50 staff PC's. Most drives are
mapped to DFS links, one drive maps directly to a share
on a server. The group policy applies this script at user
logon. Drive mapping depends on group membership. Very
cool, when it works.

Trouble is it won't always work. Users get logged in
without the drives mapping. Certain PC's (mostly XP, but
one 2000) are more problematic than others. I can take a
users account and log them into one PC and the script
maps correctly, on another PC it doesn't. But log them
off, and log them back on, and poof, it does.

I'm up for ideas of what to troubleshoot here. Generally
it is worse when the PC is turning on for the day. In
fact my temporary solution for these users is to have
them log off, without shutting down, and log back on.
Most of the time, but not all the time, that will map the
drives correctly.

Oh, and even when the mapping doesn't happen
automatically they are able to manually map the drive. So
it's not a permission issue.

Is it browser elections in the background hogging
bandwidth and effecting the users on slower segments? We
are talking 10/100 ethernet all in one building, some
hubs better than others. Our bandwidth should be hunky
dory.

Any suggestions for the best scripts to use for mapping
drives would also be appreciated as well.

Cheers...N

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

Your system(s) may be having a little trouble recognizing
that the network is available when they login (I've seen
the same problem with ordinary user login scripts.)

The first thing to try is to see if that is the case. Get
the systems notifying when "cached credentials" are
used, so that if the user can't really authenticate with a DC
at login, they'll know.

If that catches the problem then you'll need
to dig deeper to find out why the network isn't being
detected.

The cached credential hack is described here

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;242536

There's another one if you just want to prevent login with
cached credentials, but I don't recommend that.

Steve Duff, MCSE
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Sometimes this problem can be resolved by enabling synchronous logon
scripts. Go to:

Group Policy - User Configuration/Administrative
Templates//System/Logon/Logoff - enable 'Run logon scripts synchronously'

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP