2.0.6/Sol. 251/NTW4 - Drive mapping anomaly

[Ronni Dockins]

I've just gotten around to reading the mailing list archives from last month
and I saw your problem. We had the same problem starting with SP4. It was
indirectly a result of using roaming profiles. Here's an example:

I would log into one machine and map a drive to say F:. I would log out and go
to another machine that would have an F: partition so NT couldn't use F: for
that network drive. Starting with SP4, it got "helpful" and would try to map
the network drive to another letter. But I guess they forgot to check for
success and it just keeps mapping it until it runs out of letters.

To fix this, I would have to go to a machine without an F: partition and unmap
the network drive from F: and pick a higher letter.

So, in summary, for a particular profile, if you have a network drive mapped to
a letter that NT thinks belongs to a physical drive somewhere in the bowels of 
its little registry mind, NT tries to "fix" it by remapping it to another drive
and forgets to stop when it succeeds. This is also why that other fellow saw 
problems when he changed the drive letters for his cdroms. NT still remembered 
somewhere in its registry the original letters for those drives and thought 
they were "taken." And to fix it, you resolve the conflict by unmapping the
network drive from the letter in conflict.

Absolutely not a samba problem.

Ronni Dockins
dockins at cs.sc.edu
University of South Carolina