Network drive is identified as Internet Zone

[Mikkel Z. Herold]

Hi.

I have a very annoying problem that I managed to solve on one computer
running XP Home SP2, but on another computer it doesn't work:

The problem is that I have a number of mapped network drives that are
falsely identified as belonging to the Internet Zone when in fact they
are on my intranet. Among other things it prevents me from opening
Access databases stored on a network drive due toi security settings.

The problem is the one that is described in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303650 ("Intranet site is identified as
an Internet site when you use an FQDN or an IP address"), but the
workarounds suggested do not solve the problem. Even after adding the IP
address (and/or FQDN) to the Local Intranet zone, the mapped drives are
still identified as being in the Internet Zone.

As I said, I managed to solve the problem on another machine running XP
Home SP2. I did it by installing the hotfix from
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929798 ("Windows Internet Explorer 7 may
not correctly recognize the zone to which a network resource belongs
when you access the resource by using a mapped drive in Windows Vista or
in Windows XP with Service Pack 2"), but on my second computer it does
not work.

Any idea what is going on, and how I can solve this problem?

TIA,

Mikkel

 

[Mikkel Z. Herold]

Mikkel Z. Herold skrev:

Any idea what is going on, and how I can solve this problem?

I found the solution: At the bottom of
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q303650/ it says

"This workaround does not work for UNC or file:// addresses that use an
IP address. For example, Internet Explorer identifies
\\157.54.100.101\share, or file://157.54.100.101/share, as being in the
Internet zone, even if you add the appropriate IP address range to the
Local Intranet Sites list. In this case, you must use a file:// URL that
has the NetBIOS name (for example, \\server\share) for the site to be
identified in the Local intranet zone."

And I had used the IP address of my server to map the network drives.
The solution was to disconnect from all network drives and reconnect
with the NetBIOS name instead of the IP address.

So, instead of mapping the drive letter to \\192.168.1.100\myshare, I
use \\myservername\myshare, and after adding \\myservername to the list
of intranet sites, my network drives are identified correctly as
belonging to the Intranet zone!

Hope this can help other people

Mikkel