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Shared Drives drop and will not restore

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by curtisinterruptus 1 view

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Shared Drives drop and will not restore
I asked this question before, but got absolutely NO attempts to answer it, so I am trying one last time:

On a straight Windows 2000 network with shared drives on the server: with the server timeout set to30 minutes, some units' shared drives drop out (red X) and when you click, they return ok, others lock up and give an error message similar to the following: "Microsoft Windows Network: The local device name is already in use. The connection has notbeen restored." On units that are running critical apps locally but with their data files on shared drives, this causes us lost data and sometimes locked apps. I have changed NICS, double-checked NIC settings, played with timeout values, even turnedthe timeout OFF totally, with little to no luck. Any ideas?

8 replies

by sd99

This issue can occur if the drive letter that is being mapped by the net use command is already mapped in the user's properties.

by curtisinterruptus

Yes, I can understand how that could happen, but I am not using the "net use" command. These are already mapped in the user properties or they have mapped them previously themselves. After they timeout, they cannot restore the mapped connection bymerely clicking on the mapped drive. Some workstations NEVER lose mapped drives, then others always lose them after the initial timeout period and the only way they can recover them is to either disconnect and reconnect them or Restart the workstation.

by mrjay67

Have you checked the switch/hub or like equipment that they connect to. Perhaps there is a central device flaking out. Not sure this is a factor but thought it might be a different place to look if you havent already. Maybe the switch or whatever needs rebooting. I dont dont know how big your layout is so im just generalising the idea.

Hope this helps or sparks a solution.

Jason

by curtisinterruptus

I was told by one gentleman that with a "well designed system", the shared drives should NEVER time out. He suggested I check the wiring, switches and the server NIC. Any thoughts on this observation?

PS
Why would you even need "net config server /autodisconnect:" at all then?

by bobho

A couple of things to try:

The default timeout is 15 minutes in w2k (this is a microsoft thing). From a command prompt on the server side type

net config server /autodisconnect:-1

for no disconnect. This tells the server not to disconnect mapped drives but setting this from the command line may turn off auto tuning for the server service. So a better solution is to navigate to

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

and set the D_Word hex value of
"autodisconnect"=ffffffff
If "autodisconnect" doesn't exist, Add it.

The other thing to check is if the workstations are allowing the machine to power down the nic. I believe this is on by default but you should have the option to disable it. Then the nic cannot drop the network connection and lose the mapped drives.

Regards,

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