Dial-up Networking Woes

I've been having a very annoying problem for the last couple months that I've been unable to resolve for my dial-up users to our private company network.

My laptop users dial into a RAS enabled Windows 2000 server which appears to authenticate them to our network, yet their mapped drives are unavailable. A "Network path not found" error is the usual message. Other network resources such as connection to the internet and so forth work fine.

The laptops are running Win2k also and are used locally on the network with the mapped drives. Dial-up to our network does not occur until after they have logged onto the machines with cached credentials, then they connect through dial-up networking. Login through dial-up would be far too slow as we have update scripts run on the machines when they are on the local LAN.

The drives that don't seem to work are all mapped to our primary file server. Drives mapped to other server shares appear to work fine.

We do have WINS enabled on our network and the laptops show a registered WINS server IP when connected and I can see server resources with a "net view" with the exception of the one problem server.

The thing that gets me is that I can disconnect one of the mapped drives and map to it when substituting the IP of the server in the UNC path. Example: \\10.1.1.1\foo. But I get the old "Network path not found" error when try to use \\servername\foo. I've created a batch script to remap all their drives when dialed in, but I'm getting reports that even this solution has had inconsistent results.

Anyone seen anything like this? It's driving me nuts. Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Cheers,
TK

 

May be a dinged WINS record for the server. Tombstone all it's records and let em rebuild.

My recommendation for a "fix" and probably a slight speed up for your dial-in users is to simply push a hosts file onto them with entries for all your servers. Since you update via scripts, easy to modify and push a new copy out when needed.

And as a side note, if you haven't already done so, set all the PCs so they never try to become a browse master. Turn off browser service on any NT systems and change the TCP/IP settings on any 9X systems.