Win95PC's Loosing Mapped Connections 1

[smithph]

Hi, All,
Can anyone tell me if it is normal for Win95 PC's to loose manually mapped drives on a Novell 4 network? The PC's in question connect to a Novell 4 server via a script that sets up some mapped drives. These normally stay OK. We have one application that resides on a WinNT4 server, access to which is mapped from, say, Explorer, with the box ticked for Restore this connection on login. Some of these PC's have been loosing their mapped drive very infrequently. Would this be worsened if for some reason the PC is unable to connect to the NT server and makes several failing attempts? Will Windows decide that as a connection can't be made then the drive mapping is invalid? Or will Novell decide that as a connection can't be made the drive mapping is invalid?

 

[DrGreen26]

What normally happens, lets say the dirve is not availble for some reason. The novell client will eventually time out the connection and will stop trying to reconnect. The same rule applies on 95, 98, NT etc.. The reson this exists is lets say you had 1000 clients and a server went offline, you could essentially consume a lot of bandwidth with client re-connects.. hence there is a setting in the Novell client in which you can specify to attmpt the reconnect.

Second, on all platforms there is what's called "Watchdog" which basically checks to see if a connection still exists. If it does not, after so many attempts, the drive will be disconnected and so on..

Some things to do maintenance wise is to run DSREPAIR and check ds on this server, even if it does not hold a replica. Always a good practice to keep NDS healthy.

Second, I would recommend to check out on Novell's website

http://support.novell.com

for the partcular problem you are dealing with and see if a fix may have been posted.

Finally, for the NT server, I would recommend a cold re-boot if that is not already being done as NT can generate connectivity problems after running for several days.

HTH

Mark C. Greenwood, CNE
m_jgreenwood@yahoo.com

CNE 4.11 and CNE 5 certified. BS Degree in MIS. Working in the industry for 8 years.

I work with NT servers, NDS for NT as well.