Weirdness

[Darrin M. Gorski]

On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Sanborn, Ed wrote:

> For example, normally I have three shares network-mapped.  Lately,
> ceetain people are complaining that one of their shares get's remapped
> a number of times to take up all the drive letters (except drive letter Z).
> So suddenly they have 25 network-mapped drives.  

Sounds like a problem we had. Microsoft's *.LNK files (shortcuts) have a
'feature' known as 'shortcut tracking' whereby a shortcut will save the
UNC path to a file as well as the traditional drive-letter-path. However,
it the UNC path that the drive letter is mapped to differs from what the
shortcut remembers, it will map the OLD UNC path to the next available
drive letter and use that. The next time around it does the same thing
until all of the driver letters are used up.

I need to mention here that our clients are all (OK, most) Win95, but we
found a solution. Microsoft provided a program called SHORTCUT.EXE with
the W95 Resource Kit which can modify certain properties of a shortcut.
One of these properties is 'Shortcut Tracking', which I have since turned
off on our clients (well, on the shortcuts anyway). I wrote a Perl(32)
script which used SHORTCUT.EXE to properly labotamize all of the users'
shortcuts so that they blindly use a drive letter regardless of where
it's mapped to.

Unfortunately, I don't know if such an animal exists for NT, since the
shortcut files tend to be different under NT (I think the actual binary
structure of the *.LNK files is different, but I haven't had time to find
out for sure). Since our NT population is low and they are considered
'development workstations' it has not become much of an issue.

Hope this helps.

If you like a copy of my labotamizer script let me know.

                                [Darrin]

--
"I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious." - A. Einstein

Darrin M. Gorski, Research Computer Systems Network Support
Scientific Research Laboratories, Ford Motor Company
Internet: dgorski at ford.com | Tel/Fax: +1 (313) 248-3753