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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?"
I have heard of others using this program http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html to solve the issue you have. Have not used it myself, so I cannot say how good or bad the utility is
Windows Admin Tricks and Tips
www.intelliadmin.com
Create a global login script which runs for all users, check out the map root function in particular.
You can do all sorts of things with a global login script and other tweaks on a per-user basis. (We have scripts which ensure current versions of various software are installed on user machines, checks versions of the Novell client based on the client OS, etc.
Trolling is a art,
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.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Sometimes removable devices can also hijack drive letters of network drives. You can also induce this behavior by causing the network volume to go offline (disconnect machine), then have a piece of removable flash memory mount on the machine. Sometimes it will take over the now defunct network drive's letter.
However, once the network drive comes back, you won't be able to reach it until you remove the flash memory.
Hi,
It happens with any mapped drive. If you map a drive as the next avalible letter then plug in a USB device it will do the same thing.
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I use Netware like this!
Doctor: Don't use Netware like that.
-Peter
You have a solution: configure the Novell Client to use G as the first drive letter for automapped drives. Do you want someone here to come implement it for you, as well? It's a fairly simple software tweak. A few clicks on the client properties, or double-click a .REG file with the proper setting in it, etc. 10 seconds per workstation, tops. Less on a new install, since you're probably already setting the default tree and context. If your users can't do it themselves with a short e-mail explaining the steps, and you have too many of them and/or too few of you to do it for them... then your problem isn't this XP/Novell "bug" but a lack of proper support systems.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
There is nothing magic about the F: drive and Netware. It just happens to be the traditional default mapping. There is no reason why you need to accept that the default. Simply modify the login script(s) and/or the client settings on the computers. Geez. Was this REALLY worthy of an "Ask Slashdot?"
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
eDirectory.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What? MODs, why is this flamebait? That was a good question.
Why are people using Netware? I can understand working with an existing installation of it, but who in their right mind is setting up Netware servers for the first time these days?
Life is not for the lazy.
...of having the efficient Software Vendor solve these issues?
Isn't that the advantage of proprietary software over, say, gnu/linux?
Thats what the marketroids tell us anyway...
Foolishness aside; I suspect it is possible to create a filter device below the USB storage device which starts drive mapping from z and works down (for a knee jerk) or which reads currently mapped drives from explorer's context and starts there.
This would require significantly more knowledge of that crufty beast the registry than I have; but Im sure there are some of those out there.
err!
jak.
yegads, this is the exact same problem windows 3.1 had with adding hard drives!!! Ever wonder why you so often see novell drives mapped to letters way down the alphabet? thats why :)
Unless im misunderstanding the problem, just change your drive maps to be higher than say, G:, and you should be fine!
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.
Map your drives as persistent and USB does not walk on them. Admittedly, I have not hit this problem with windows 2k/2k3 AD domain, or in a Netware 5 environment. All my drives map persistent without issue. Remember, I may be talking out my arse since I haven't been bitten by this issue.
New drive or mapped network drive not available in Windows Explorer:
According to Novell eDirectory runs just fine on Linux. The parent didn't say 'why use novell anymore' he said why use Netware and that is a valid question when novell has moved on to Linux nowdays.
You can query WMI for a variety of data using Perl, for example, to find out all the removable media drives in the system, then construct a diskpart script (particularly the command assign).
ah, mod points
But does not ConsoleOne provide you with a method as to how these drives map. I am pretty sure it does since we always had certain drives setup to map one way on all machine. This standardized things for users to look at their "K" drive or whatever. If I am wrong, which I suppose is possible it has been almost two years since I used C1, you should be able to setup things with policies. If you have an AD domain, this is simple since you can lay it out as a group policy and have it trickle down to everyone with no real interaction. Otherwise, you will probably need to set it on a machine-by-machine basis, but this shouldn't be too bad since you can do it using remote management and not have to have any real user interaction.
But like I said, I could be wrong. I got away from IT work the second I got my engineering degree, which was almost a year and a half ago.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
You are aware that modern Netware runs under SuSE Linux, right?
I use Samba and I like Samba. If the scope of your task is a small office with 10 users, one fileserver and one printserver then Samba is a fine choice.
I don't think I'd try to set up a clustered san-based fileserver environment using it. I probably could but some of the range of software components I'd have to use are pretty sketchy. When you want "enterprise" filesharing, Netware has it all in one place with refined management GUIs.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Sharing your data among Windows, Linux/BSD and Mac users while maintaining the proper user and group permissions under Linux can be a pain.
Netware is a decent server OS and never bombs out for us. There's a setup within our organization trying what you suggest. You can basically DoS the whole thing by copying a large file from one volume to another through NFS.
Trolling is a art,
Exactly the same problem occurs with subst'd drives:
subst the usb drive's letter to a local directory before inserting the usb drive, then insert the drive. one masks the other.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Because it just plain works. We are currently migrating our Microsoft server environment to Netware (and probably/eventually to Open Enterprise Server in the future).
Don't be so narrow minded.
Self awareness - try it!
'Cause if it ain't broke, don't fix it.... and NetWare doesn't break much.
It can break, of course, just as much as any OS can, but generally once you get it stable it just runs. I've seen NetWare boxes run for years without a reboot - in corporate environments, supporting users and printers, doing their job.
Have you got a box you haven't done a OS reload or recompile on in seven years? I do. It's NetWare 4.11. It sits quietly in the corner and serves files. It's fairly secure, as it runs IPX making it difficult to get to from the internet. NDS (eDirectory) makes user and rights managment as cinch. And it doesn't require new/fast/powerful hardware to support 30 or so users. Or even 300.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
Map a different letter for the user's home directory. I have it map the H: drive and tell them "H for Home."
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
We have deployed this to all our clients in our Novell network. IF they plug a USB device in and it does nto show up, they double click this program and it fixes all conflicts: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/16845.ht ml
I heard somewhere that Windows XP included (Fairly hidden away) support for UNIX-like mounts on a filesystem...
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
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.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Novell has moved on, but moving from NetWare to Linux is no trivial migration...
As someone else said: reality bites.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our environment.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
You gave good answers (as did others) to why NetWare is still in use and needed. However, the question was out of curiosity. You see it as flaimbait because you expect "everyone" to know the answers you just gave.
Sir, you are arrogant!
Life is not for the lazy.
In what manner? It should be a relatively transparent migration. After all the services remain the same. Since you are running all the same applications it should be no more difficult to migrate to a Linux-based Novell setup than to a new Netware-based setup.
Unless you mean IT staff training, its all backend so it shouldn't require any training outside IT. That is as easy as retiring the old netware guys (except one to assist in the transition) and hiring starving linux gurus to replace them. True the *nix guys (should) call a higher salary than novell guys but they are probably early in their careers compared to the old timer novellers. The experience difference will probably result in a net savings in yearly salary overall.
*braces himself for flames from netwarers who don't want to be obsolete and would rather try to secure their jobs by preventing progress than by learning the new system*
Doesn't seem a genuine question to me. To ask 'why' and then state a position that something else is better smacks of flamebait. Nor did it to even attempt to address the question asked in article.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
It may be because the corporate network is not connected to the Internet. Hard to beat that air gap.
But he must still be able to get patches d/l from update sites onto the corporate network.
Thus the sneaker net.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
of course one big way to solve this would be to stop using "drive letters" at all
(unc paths or mount points)
i propose that the phrase air gap be modded to air/faraday gap (indicating that both a hard line and wireless net is not present)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Just log out and back in with the USB device in... works for me every time. Is there some bigger issue I'm missing here? Because if I log in with the USB device already in, it's mapped correctly every time. Have I unknowingly found a solution? :S
honestly, without udev or devfs linux has the same problem, as device nodes for removables are not "remembered". I recall also not removable stuff like NIC wireless and tcpip over firewire randomly getting eth0/eth2, i fixed it with udev.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol