Weird windows networking issue

[Dieselboy]

I'm a bit stumped at this one and it's affecting me and others.

The issue is, when we bring our laptops from home into the office (the work laptops!) OR occasionally we open our laptops at home, then connect to the VPN we cannot connect to our network drives. When we try we get various errors:

- you are not authorised to log on from this station
- the network name is already in use / already connected

I've found that if we manage to disconnect/unmap the drive then we can map it again. The other option is reboot the laptop.

The issue seems to be because of going away from the corp. network, the drives are not reachable and so become disconnected. When we connect to the VPN or go back inside the office we cannot get the drives connected.

Has anyone seen this before? Any pointers for me as to what to look at? 

[deanwebb]

I hate mapping drives. I much prefer shortcuts to \\servername\sharename.

Fun fact: at Microsoft, there used to be a software distribution server share... \\whack\whack. There was also \\paddy\giveyourdogabone. Good times.

Anyway, this may have something to do with how credentials are cached or not properly disconnecting the mapped drives before leaving the office... are the afflicted laptops coming up from sleep or hibernate mode? Does this affect laptops that were shut down before disconnecting from the network?

[Dieselboy]

I believed it was caused due to sleeping the laptop, going home and using it, then back to sleep, then coming in the office. The HR girl hasn't had this issue for a while though so I've closed the ticket.

Good idea on the shortcuts. If this happens again, I'll remove all the mappings and then set up shortcuts within explorer. I've also just read the use case for NOT using mapped drives (cryptolocker) so seems the disadvantages to mapped drives may outweigh the benefits now

[deanwebb]

Yeah, mapped drives are so 1997. Time to graduate to desktop shortcuts.