Windows Vista + XP-based network drive == error
We’ve got a new Vista-based computer at home, to do the all-important financials and some random surfing.
As our house is also equipped with a pc dedicated to be the media-server, and it runs on XP. (I know, I’m too lazy to set up a Linux-based, Samba enabled box 😉 )
It is running quite steadily for quite some time now, and the previous machine sitting in our living room used to be another XP-based box; which evidently caused no issues.
Enter Vista, and mounting the network drive went wrong each and every time.
What is the issue here: upon startup I would like to have the drive \\server\music\ mounted on drive M: (obvious 🙂 ) with a different user as the one logged on on the Vista-machine.
This user-account is a dedicated, low-rights account living solely on the server.
So I’m clicking happily away on the Vista-machine. Add new network-drive, filling in the address, clicking "log on using different user-account’, filling in the appropriate parameters, setting it to reconnect at startup, and connecting. Yay! I can browse the directory 😀
Rebooting: ERROR. "Cannot connect to network-drive M:\".
Crap.
After some rigorous googling, it turns out that Vista is not really capable of mounting a network-drive from anything other than Vista directly after booting when the IP-address of the Vista-machine is not set to be a DHCP-leased address. Apparently, Vista needs time to set the IP manually, which takes some time. It does not wait for this operation to finish before mounting a network drive, an thus this fails miserably as there is no network connection at that time. :s
Creating a bat-file, and executing it at startup proves to be the solution to this issue: the programs launching via Start-> Programs -> Startup only launch after all Windows-services have launched, and will always launch after connection to the network, if the connection is provided.
So here goes:
[source:php]net use M: \\\\server\\music password /user:username[/source]
Quick & dirty workarounds ftw 😀
Paper tiger solutions ftl!
Hehe, as it is just a pretty annoying bug, this is not only the Q&D workaround, it is the _only_ solution under these circumstances. 😉
Blah: it works for me though.
Hey, I was serious 🙂 Q&D ftw!
Microsoft could just toss a few working hours at it to shift the IP allocation sequences to a different moment. Of course, that’ll probably just create more shit, but eh. They’ve got smart people there. They can figure it out.
ZOMG! It’s a Microsoft bash 😀
I think you’re right though, as it can easily be solved by shifting around various sequences during startup, annoyances like mine could have been solved before release, or during alpha- and beta-testing.
Let’s hope it’ll be fixed with Vista SP1.