Fixes for WinXP Ignoring Novell Disk Mapping?

Arcidius asks: "It's been a year and still nobody seems to have a real solution for getting USB devices to work under Windows XP in an Novell environment. If you're running Windows XP and Novell servers (NetWare 6 for us), Windows XP will show all drives available, even though usually many are have been drive mapped. When you plug in an external hard drive or USB device, Windows maps it to the first free drive letter, usually F:, but since Novell has mapped it already, you can't access the drive. The fix so far has been to manually remap the memory key to a free letter, such as B:, and this has to be done on every machine. Either that, or switch your first mapped drive, which is more of a problem in most environments. Since Novell can't figure out a solution, (and Microsoft obviously doesn't care), I throw it to Slashdot. Does anyone have a real, network wide solution?"

Comments

Not a problem with Novell

[SCPRedMage]

I fail to see how this is a Novell issue, since this will occur with ANY network share mapped to a drive letter, even in a Windows domain.

Re:Not a problem with Novell

[Bios_Hakr]

Just about every organization I have consulted for has assigned the shared drives to high drive letters.

Something like S: for global shares, T: for team shares, P: for personal network storage, O: for organizational forms and memos.

Just come up with something that makes sense within your company.

BTW, when I build a PC at home, the first thing I do is move the drives around. I move the CD/DVD to Z: and my USB hard drive to U:.

Map Network Shares Backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you should consider only mapping network drives backwards in the alphabet, ie: start from Z: and go backwards... Y: X: W: etc....you then don't have to worry about removable device conflicts with mapped network shares.

seems to function fine in my network.

Re:People still use Netware?

[misleb]

eDirectory.

sneakernet and Novell being used together - why?

[ecloud]

You know, it sure is a good sign that the network (and the Internet) are not as easy to use as they should be, when people still find it easier to shuffle data around on removeable media. I was thinking about that at work the other day, because I do the same thing, even though we have really ubiquitous networking there - both Ethernet and wireless, and they are secure and interoperable. First, I'd need to "discover" the machine to which I want to send a file. Bonjour is decent for that, at least for single-hop networking, but I imagine net admins don't like it. (And they also like to assign alphabet-soup machine names which don't make it any easier.) I'd want to assign my own memorable nicknames for machines that I use, probably. I would want to deal with a limited set of those machines that I use, to which I've assigned nicknames, and be able to filter out the irrelevant ones. And then be able to right-click on a file and "send to... the xeon in the lab", and do it without any password crap. The file ought to show up in an "incoming from Shawn's laptop" directory on the other machine. There's nothing very insecure about that as long as you treat incoming files like incoming email, e.g. don't execute something unless you know what it is. This method should work across every machine that I touch regularly, on every network that is interconnected via the Internet, and across every OS too. Right now, exchanging files via bluetooth is something like that, but it has limited range.

The best you can do now is have a central repository (e.g. file server) set up ahead of time, and mounted on both machines. Then you do the copy twice, and the file ends up taking up space on 3 disks instead of 2. Or email it, which is similar but less secure (it has to be set up in advance, and the file takes up space as files on 2 machines, plus a mail attachment, until you delete one or more of the copies). Or mount one machine's drive on the other (but that is usually some hassle and only works on the local network).

But because of admins, and paranoid security policies, we can't do easy ad-hoc file exchange. So we use USB keys or floppies or SD cards or CD-ROMs or whatever. And some admins can get paranoid about that, too.

Re:People still use Netware?

[Degrees]

I disagree that it was a good question. I've got thirty NetWare servers, and they work fine thank you. If you have a tool that manages file system rights for 2,000 users across thirty servers with a single click - I'd like to know about it.

The real problem is that forever we have mapped the E: drive to the Everyone folder. For a decade or more, our user's have been using Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to connect a spreadsheet pie chart into a word processing file. Guess what happens when you change the drive letter from E: to U: ?

And how does switching from NetWare to Samba change the problem?

It doesn't.

So yes, the question was flamebait.