network drive connection

mattmos · 24 Jul 2010 at 04:10

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!

mattmos · 24 Jul 2010 at 17:14

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!

mattmos · 26 Jul 2010 at 11:13

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.

mattmos · 26 Jul 2010 at 18:11

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.

mattmos · 27 Jul 2010 at 01:41

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.