Re: Intermittent Workgroup Problems

qas wrote:
I have a small workgroup network with a handful of machines, most are W2K Pro and 1 is XP Pro. They are connected through a router (1 cabled, others wireless) and each has a shared folder with permissions set for “remote access” accounts that are different from the “local user” accounts. e.g. userA on machineA can access the shared folder on machineB by entering logon/password for remoteX.

Zone Alarm firewall on each machine has been configured to trust the subnet.

On a good day this all works as expected. UserA opens Network Places and traverses to the workgroup, the machine and the share. Upon clicking on the shared folder a prompt appears and with appropriate credentials (of remoteX) access is granted.

On a bad day various scenarios may occur.
1) Network Places finds the Workgroup but not all the connected machines
2) Network Places finds the Workgroup and the connected machine but the prompt does not appear. Instead an access denied message is returned.
3) Network Places finds the Workgroup but shows a machine that is no longer connected
I have tried numerous things such as disabling the firewall, synchronizing a single logon/password on all machines, rebooting etc. None of these make any difference “on a bad day”.

I have resisted using “mapping network drive” since machines are often offline. Past experience on corporate networks has shown that if any of the mappings is inaccessible, simple functionality is negatively impacted while the system waits to timeout.

How do I “force” Network Places to find all connected machines? (Open, Explore, Expand, Search for Computers don’t solve the problem)

How do I refresh Network Places to remove machines that are not currently connected?

How do I force a logon prompt to appear for the share?

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

q


After some more experimentation, I have decided to "abandon" Network Places. I have created simple mapping scripts for each user.

One of the "bad day" symptoms of Access Denied occurs if you double click instead of single click and W2K automatically maps the drive without asking for a userid/password. Since the userid/password are inappropriate access is denied, but you have been (silently) mapped anyway. Eventually you can find out that you need to disconnect and start over but ... User error - bad design ?!?

The other quirks, NP does not find/refresh the workgroup or NP displays connections that are no longer online just arent worth the effort.

NP is gone. Back to the DOS days of scripting.

The only real problem left is the inability of 1 W2K machine to print to the shared printer. There have been allusions to MS patch problems in other newsgroups.

thanks for the advice

q
.

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