Win98SE clients connecting to Win2000 shares

Hi

First post here, hopefully you guys can help me out. I'm more of a Unix/Linux guy but work on Windows for some friends and small clients.

I have a peer-peer Win98SE network with 4 pc's connecting to a Windows 2000 server with several shares. All the clients have read/write access to the shares and can map the shares and read/write files okay, including being able to browse the network in 'Network Neighborhood'.

The problem comes when a couple of the pc's have to be rebooted, when you log in it always fails to connect to the shared resources which are supposed to 'Reconnect at login', however if you go to Windows Explorer after the pc has finished rebooting and click through 'Entire Network' to the server you are able to see the shares and reconnect okay and all is good from there. Obviously this isn't ideal at all.

All the pc's are on the same workgroup.
Network setup for each pc:
DHCP provided by a SBC 4 port linksys - all pc's get a valid ip address
IPX/SPX enabled
NETBEUI
NETBIOS support for IPX/SPX

All these pc's were connecting to a Novell server before it crashed hard and was replaced with the 2000 server. I've removed the Netware client from Windows networking and have looked for any Novell references in autoexec.bat, not sure if there's anywhere else that I need to look.

Anyone any ideas why this would happen on reboot, it just seems that the pc is trying to connect to the server without the network being fully set up yet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

First off, you can remove IPX/SPX, NetBEUI, and NetBIOS support for IPX/SPX from all the machines and just let them use TCP/IP for communications.

You do want to either leave NetBIOS over TCP/IP enabled on all the network cards (see the picture and either the default as I have it or the next selection to enable it). There are a couple other options and in theory, NetBIOS creates a slight security risk but IMO with your setup, more theoretical than real.

You didn't specify but I'm assuming you are running a peer-to-peer setup - where the PCs all belong to a workgroup (so the 2K server IS NOT acting as a domain controller). In that case, you'll make things run more smoothly and very possibly get rid of the connection issue if each 98 PC requires a username and non-blank password logon and if a copy of each logon is added to the 2K server's list of user accounts. Case sensitive so an exact match. Easiest way to get to the right spot for adding them is right-click on My Computer, left-click on Manage, go to Local Users and Groups then to Users and add the accounts.

I sympathize with your plight. I moved from CTOS to Open-VMS to Digital Unix to Microsoft OS versions and it can get real confusing.