Drives not always being mapped?

[techyphil]

Hi,

I've recently had a new bunch of laptops setup for staff. They are all Dell Latitudes D531's with Windows Xp + SP3.

They all seem to have a similar issue. The logon script doesnt want to always run and they will be missing a HOME drive and the mapped drives from my batch file.

Anyone else having these glitches as I assume an update has caused this?

Thanks

[craiglay]

Are you trying to login wirelessly? You may have to play about with the group policy to force Windows to run the scripts as there is a timeout which may cause this.

I'm afraid I'm not at work today so haven't got access to a server to tell ya what they are but roughly, its "slow link detection" and "always wait for roaming profile"

Craig

[burgemaster]

I was about to post the exact same problem....

When the teachers log in connected to the network their drives all map fine...
We have a staff share and a Public area, if they choose to syncronize a few folders from each drive and then login at home they do not see these drives?

Does the login script get copied to the local laptop and still run when offline?
in the event log it says something like cannot connect to dc1\netlogon\map_drives.vbs

should i create a local copy of the script to the laptop and add it to the startup list?

[Michael]

There was a discussion about this not long ago. It depends on how you map your home drives.

\\server\share\user doesn't seem to work with XP SP3, however \\server\user$ seems ok. I use the 2nd method. I have XP SP3 machines, both wired and wireless in use (so I know this way definitely works).

[techyphil]

Still having this issue.

Ive tried loads of GP changes reguarding slow link detection.. wait for network before logging on etc

Its still so random.

It's got to a stage where the logon script is being ran from the users desktop by hand if they have the problem.

Its sooo annoying

[techyphil]

Still having this issue.

Ive tried loads of GP changes reguarding slow link detection.. wait for network before logging on etc

Its still so random.

It's got to a stage where the logon script is being ran from the users desktop by hand if they have the problem.

Its sooo annoying

[RabbieBurns]

I had a similar problem, and solved it by clearing any mapped drives first with

net use /del * /y

and then mapping the new ones

[maniac]

Sometimes you need to put a delay at the start of the login script to make sure the user is properly logged on before the script runs, particularly with newer faster machines that try and run scripts before the user is properly logged in. I've had this problem and used this at the start of my VBS login script.

Dim WSHNetwork
Dim strUserName 
Set WSHNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
strUserName = ""
While strUserName = ""
WScript.Sleep 100 ' 1/10 th of a second
strUserName = WSHNetwork.UserName
Wend

What it does is wait for the username value to be populated before continuing with the rest of the script.

If you want to convert your whole drive mapping script to VBS, then here's the whole script.

Dim WSHNetwork
Dim strUserName 
Set WSHNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
strUserName = ""
While strUserName = ""
WScript.Sleep 100 ' 1/10 th of a second
strUserName = WSHNetwork.UserName
Wend

call map("P:", "\\server\public$")
call map("S:", "\\server\sims$")

end sub

sub map( drive, share )
on error resume next
WSHNetwork.removenetworkdrive drive, true
WSHNetwork.mapnetworkdrive drive, share
end sub

Obviously you can add as many map drive lines as you like for different drives. Just save it as something.VBS and use it insted of your batch file.

[DMcCoy]

How do machines connect? Is it using 802.1x with user authentication? You may wish to ping a machine during login to see if the network state changes during login anyway.

One issue that can't be solved is the timing for contacting the domain after boot, if netlogon tries before zero config has connected then it will miss the domain and scripts may fail to run and policies don't always apply.

This is not fixable on XP. The authentication for wired/wireless is seperate from the netlogon process and they will not wait for each other. I believe it is fixed on vista, and while I was hoping it would be fixed in sp3 due to the NAP client, it wasn't.