Mapped drives keep disconnecting
I run a small network of about 200 users and recently introduced Vista on the network to about 10 of the users. One of the users is having the following issue with mapped drives. When logging in she has a batch file that maps 5 drives to her machine. 3 of the drives point to a windows 2003 server and 2 of the drives point to a windows 2000 server. After approx. 15 - 30 minutes the user will attempt to goto oone of the drives only to discover that they are all disconnected. When she double clicks on them she gets an error message stating that the drive is already in use, etc. and the only way to get her drive mappings back is to either reboot or disconnect her drives and them manually map them. If I manually map them they go thru the same disconnect scenario as above. Any ideas on this? Thanks
September 22nd, 2008 6:52pm

Hi, This behavior is by designed. This behavior occurs because Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Server 2003 can drop idle connections after a specified time-out period (by default, 15 minutes) to prevent wasting server resources on unused sessions. The connection can be re-established very quickly, if required. To resolve this issue, you can run the following command on your computer: net config server /autodisconnect:-1 This command will turn off the autodisconnect feature. For more information, please refer to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: Mapped Drive Connection to Network Share May Be Lost http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q297684 Hope it helps.
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September 24th, 2008 2:06am

Excellent tip. I knew this was something that was simply inherent to the Windows OS, but I was always told "there's not much you can do about it other than just re-click on it and let it re-establish the connection". Ignorance begets ignorance. That's why we have freakin... *counts* 5 star generals like you to lead us to obscure and mostly unknown commands. As a co-worker of mine used to say "90% of any IT problem is knowing that a solution exists, and how to find it. The other 10% is actually fixing the problem." -- Actually he just said 90% is being able to find the solution and being efficient at going through forum posts like these and search results, filtering out what's a good lead and what's a false one. Aside from him... this mapped drive issue.... I always had attributed it to some kind of authentication timeout to a remote resource. Now there's a cure... of course, now that I'm no longer using mapped drives from where I'm working from now (home)... haha. Oh well, I'll add it to my 5,000 other "great information/rare tips that I'll only use once or twice in my career, but dang it, at least I have the fix if i can find it again! ;) Should've been using something like OneNote with greater zeal.
July 1st, 2011 7:47am

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