Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
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.
New drive or mapped network drive not available in Windows Explorer:
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,
'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.
Drive letters are assigned by the OS, period. Neither NTFS or FAT has any idea what drive letters they are, or in fact any concept of drive letters.
Letters are assigned, under Windows, by simply picking the first one as the drives are enumerated in their fairly random order. However, if a device has a 'serial number', which most USB ones do, you can assign it a specific drive letter in the console, and Windows will remember it.
Sometimes you will run across weird cases, like USB drives that share serial numbers, so whatever you assign to one of them will get assigned to the other, or ones that don't have a serial number and hence won't 'remember' any assignments. (Sometimes you can name the partition and Windows will remember, sometimes not.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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!"