Unable to map network drive by name

[NeoWalker]

I am unable to map to a shared drive on one of our NT servers from a Windows 2000 client via sharename, however, I can map to the drive via IP.

Heres the problem in more detail:

Shared folder on our stratford server with an IP of 10.44.0.2 called finance. users map the drive as \\stratford\finance

However, one user cannot map to the shared finance folder by name, instead the user has to map the drive by typing
\\10.44.0.2\finance

I can ping stratford via command prompt on the users machine and it can see it.

Anyone with any ideas?

Thanks

[mairving]

You might get more info from the command prompt.

Try using net use drive letter: \\stratford\finance. The net view command can also be helpful. Does the ping return the same IP address? There could be an entry in the hosts file pointing to another IP. If so you could ping it but unless that share was there you wouldn't be able to access the share.

[KHT]

something I tried and worked in a similar situation was to enter the netbios name and ip address on the local machine in the lmhosts and host file.

for instance, in your lmhosts and host file all the way at the bottom enter [10.44.0.2 stratford], (no brackets of course and you must have a space between IP and name). and then ping stratford from a cmd prompt. it should then resolve the netbios name and give you a ping response. If it doesnt, let us know the exact error message you get.

once it has resolved the netbios name it should be able to map a drive to the shared folder using the \\servername\sharename command

[mairving]

It is resolving the name on ping but not when using the net command so there is a mixup somewhere. You can make an entry into the hosts file but that is generally a bad way to do it in a Networked environment since later if you want to make a change, then you will have to visit that machine to do so. You could try making an entry in lmhosts on the server. Generally W2K machines don't function well at all unless you have a DNS server for them.

It would probably help too to know how your network is setup. Are you using WINS on the NT server? Do you have any Windows 2000 servers in the network?