Win95/Win98 Netserver drive mapping problems

["Peter Dow" <maillist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

There's tons on this subject in the archive, and I gleaned a couple of work
arounds, but nothing that explains the problem.  A client of mine has a
VRM510 AS400 on which they're sharing a folder from the IFS, (/SMART), over
their LAN (their LAN actually covers several geographically separate sites).
The permissions on the share grant everything to everyone, i.e. *PUBLIC is
*RWX.

At one of these sites, they have no problem mapping to the share.  At two
other sites, some PC's work, some don't.  All the users attempting this also
use CAE to access the AS400 with no problem.  Userid doesn't appear to be
the problem -- one Win95 user whose PC userid does not exist on the AS400
has no problem mapping the drive.

My contact said they use WINS for name resolution, but that he's also tried
using the IP address of the AS400 from a failing PC, e.g.
\\10.10.10.10\SMART, and that didn't work either.  None of the PC's use
ZoneAlarm or any other personal firewall software.  I asked if perhaps some
router was filtering the SMB traffic, and he said no -- they had a working
and failing PC's side-by-side, so they took the LAN cable from the working
PC and connected it to the failing PC, and no change.  They took a brand new
PC, scratch installed Win2K Pro on it, and it failed.  They are using
backslashes in the UNC.

His theory is that there's a limit to how many share names Windows can
handle, something like 64KB worth, and when it's doing its discovery
process, it blows the table and reports that it can't find the server.  I
would've thought any limitiation like that would have been taken care of in
W2K, but possibly not.  They do have a lot of machines on their LAN,
although I'm not certain of the exact number.

I found a suggestion in the archives about having a working PC share the
mapped drive and passed that along -- I've never tried it, but sounds like
it might work.  I apologize for the lack of attribution, but you know who
you are <grin>!

Does anyone have any other ideas?  I've run out of questions to ask.

Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050 voice
909 522-3214 cellular
909 793-4480 fax