Re: Mapped Drives to home folders on laptops

maxrawson@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Forwarding the following discussion to the Server/AD group for
assistance. Please review the following....thanks,

Max



1. maxraw...@xxxxxxxxx

Periodically, mapped drives on laptops will not "remap" when the users
log back into the network. Once this happens I remap the drive for
them and things work okay for awhile. Not all laptop users are
affected...mainly just the President, go figure. Any thoughts from
anyone....is there a setting or a bug that I'm overlooking? Thanks in
advance for your time, Max


2. Pegasus (MVP) View profile

Instead of relying on "remembered" drive letters, use a logon
script to mape the drives at logon time. In this way you stay
in control at all times.

@echo off
net use /persistent:no
net use S: \\YourServer\Finance


3. maxraw...@xxxxxxxxx View profile
Thanks for your reply...tried it and it worked.

I was just thinking though, in AD, I've set each users' Home Folder
to
connect to U: \\ServerName\Users$\%username%. Isn't this supposed to
do the same thing? If so, why would it not work sometimes when
laptop
users logon to the network after being away.


One other piece of info, laptop users connect to our network remotely
via ISA server VPN services. Complaints have been made that they
cannot connect to their user folder when VPN'ed in. Do you think
these things might be related?


-Max



4. Pegasus (MVP)

Thanks for your reply...tried it and it worked.

I was just thinking though, in AD, I've set each users' Home Folder to
connect to U: \\ServerName\Users$\%username%. Isn't this supposed to
do the same thing? If so, why would it not work sometimes when laptop
users logon to the network after being away.


One other piece of info, laptop users connect to our network remotely
via ISA server VPN services. Complaints have been made that they
cannot connect to their user folder when VPN'ed in. Do you think
these things might be related?


-Max

I do not use the "Home Folder" concept, hence I cannot help you
there. I suggest you report this question in a Server newsgroup.

You write "they cannot connect to their user folder when VPN'ed in".
This statement means nothing to me: I don't know what exactly
they are doing when connecting to their user folders and I don't
know what message (if any) they get when they try.


> I've set each users' Home Folder to connect to U:

Your home directory specifies a mapped drive ("U:\"). If the mapped drive doesn't exist, it won't be able to connect. This is the "NT" way, and unless you have pre-windows 2000 clients should be replaced by folder redirection in group policy. Folder synchronization is enabled by default so users "My Documents" will be available offline when they are not connected to the work network (you can disable offline files if you don't want to do it that way). Also, it is considered "less than best practices" to refer to a mapped drive in a profile path, home directory, for the very reason that the mapped drive is dynamic.


> Complaints have been made that they cannot connect to their user
> folder when VPN'ed in. Do you think these things might be related?

Probably not. Are the remote users connecting their VPNs before they logon (the "dial this connection first" option)? If not, they will not be able to log into the domain properly. Also, NetBIOS name resolution won't work across a routed connection unless you are using WINS, which also will require the VPN to be up and running prior to any reference to a name on the remote network.

....kurt
.

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