Mapping Drives 1

[shannonlapekas]

The owner of my company recently built a new building that is going to be his new corporate headquarters. He is moving his office to the new location this week. During the last week he connected his facilities together with fiber. I have all of the equipment in place to be able to route data over the fiber between the facilities. At each of the locations there was a domain controller with its own AD. I have since upgraded the server at the new location to Windows 2003 and have made it the domain controller for my forest. At another facility I have upgraded the domain controller and made it a child of the first domain. For this domain I have added all of the servers of that domain back to the domain controller in that facility. In a third location I have upgraded the domain controller on a brand new server and have added it as child domain. There is still a domain controller in that facility and all of the servers are still on that domain controller. The file servers won't be added to the new domain controller for about a week.

Here is where my problem lays. The owner is moving to his new office this week. He wants to have access to data that is at all three of these locations on the file servers. Right now when I map a drive to these locations I have to use the IP address and the share name on the server to get the drive mapped. Then whenever the desktop is shut down you have to remap the drive and put in the admin user name and password to connect. Is there any way to keep these drives mapped for him?

 

[Scanner]

If you have to use the IP address in your manual drive mappings then it looks like you have a problem with DNS resolution in your AD Domain.

You can check this by attempting to ping via IP address to the server you want mapped, then try pinging again using the server name instead of IP.

If your IP ping is OK, but your server name ping drops, then DNS needs reconfigured. At the very least, you may need to recreate the host record for the server name in DNS.

How is your boss logging in to his machine? Do you have a machine and user account for him on the domain or is he logging into the local machine?

If he's got a user account on the domain, then you should be able to set up a login script in the \NETLOGON share and not worry about manually remapping the drive(s).

 

[shannonlapekas]

Thank you for the information. I had created logon scripts for the local drives but can you tell me how to create a log on script that will be able to authenticate to the share? I currently can't give the user permissions to the share so I need to set up the script to be able to authenicate to the other servers share upon log on.

 

[Scanner]

When setting up shares in any batch file the base command is "net use".

At the end of the line you can add the "/USER" delimiter with any logon credentials that might be different than those being used to log into the machine.

A sample line would look something like this...

net use H: \\server\share /USER:domain\username

If necessary, you will be prompted for a valid password for that account. It's much simpler if you make sure both passwords are the same so it will "pass through" from the machine logon.