Win98 Clients dropping mapped drives

[Guest]

We have a Win2K domain with WinXP, Win2K, WinNT, and Win98 clients. We are
having a problem with the Win98 clients dropping mapped drives. They get the
drives mapped via the logon script but the connection drops after a random
amount of time. There are no errors in the server logs and the client
displays no error. Any ideas what may be causing this?

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

Not sure how you chose the .dns group for this, but
then again I suppose there is no .mappeddrives group...

The first thing to do is to disable autodisconnect
on the server(s). You do this with the CMD-prompt
command on the server: "net config server /autodisconnect:-1".
You only need to do this once on each server, but I usually put
it in a startup script just to document the configuration.

This will take care of the problem 3/4ths of the time. If that
doesn't solve it, try loading the DS client on the Win9x systems.
Also make sure to do a net use * /delete at the start of mapping
to clear the share table. You can also try mapping through
kixtart scripting, which will help in some situations, as will running
Netbios over IPX as the default protocol for the Win9x machines.

After that the resolutions get pretty deep.

Steve Duff, MCSE
Ergodic Systems, Inc.