network drive connection

mattmos

mattmos

mattmos

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Joined
16 Apr 2009
Posts
273
Location
Kington St Michael
I've got a small office network (really small, 3 nodes). One is the server, and two workstations.

When powering up the workstations they don't automatically connect to the mapped network drive I've set up. I have to click on the symbol for the drive and it opens fine, but initially no connection, and if I start another app before clicking the drive letter the app won't find the shared drive.

Using windows 7 Pro 64, a netgear Gigabit router (otherwise I couldn't get the networking working at all, even with static ip addresses) and going through a netgear Gigabit switch to the machines (I plan to add more soonish).

Any suggestions gratefully received!
 
I have a windows XP NAS/File sever. I have the same problem, on any of the 6 computers they mapped drive shows up as being disconnected but if you try and access it, its fine...
 
They're all using win7 64, I heard about issues mixing win7 and xp so upgraded all at the same time. Hasn't helped though!
 
Does it still happen if you wait say, 60secs after reaching the desktop? I haven't seen it on W7 yet but on previous versions (inc XP) it was possible for some machines to show the desktop or logon screen before the wired network had fully initialised, thus giving errors if you tried a network operation straight away. Simply waiting a few secs let everything work fine.
If this is your problem then setting this local policy may help "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon"
 
True enough if the extra delay is long and the users keep some local data that they could otherwise have started working on. If all the useful stuff is on the network, then I guess it works out around the same overall time but should be simpler for the users (i.e. once they can see the desktop, they should be ready to work with anything).

OP if it doesn't help or is too annoying to live with, then you can simply disable the policy to return things to how they were. Let us know how you get on.
 
I turned this on for some people at a clients when they had an issue with not being able to use the network the second they logged in.

They lasted about 18 hours before I got an email asking for it to be turned off! :p
 
Heh thanks for the replies. It does seem to be a simple matter of waiting - but it was more like 5 minutes here, for all the applications to be able to read the network connection as up and running.

For the moment I've taken out the netgear gigabit unmanaged switch (5 port) and plugged all the machines directly into the router, which has 4 gigabit ports. For some reason this seems to make the initial connection to the network much faster.

I guess when I need to expand the network with render machines, it won't be as much of a priority for them to get a fast boot up connection, whereas I don't want to wait too long for the workstations to connect.
 
How are you dealing with IP addresses? Are you using the Router for DHCP to give out IP addresses to the other machines?

E-I
 
I am now yeah. I tried assigning a static ip to every machine on the network, but it didn't seem to make a difference. That's how I used to network when using xp.

Taking out the unmanaged switch has made a difference though.
 
Looks like it was a switch issue then. Where was it stored? I know my old router used to get twitchy when it got very warm [slow network response etc].
 
Sandwiched inbetween two overclocked i7s :)
There was decent airflow to the switch, but it did get quite toasty. If I re-use it I'll watch out for that.
 
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