Windows 2000 issues on NT 4.0 server

G

Guest

Guest
I'm having an issue with my Windows 2000 computers that I'm purchasing and I'm hoping someone here knows the problem.

I installed a few Windows 2000 computers on my network, only because Dell is moving away from Windows NT 4.0 and that was my only option for laptops. My servers are ALL still running Windows NT 4.0 SP5. I also have a batch file execute upon log on that maps the network drives for each user. Here is where the problem is...

On the Windows 2000 machines only, after log on the batch file executes with no problem and the network drives are mapped like normal. You go to my computer and the drives are there with no errors and are easily accessible. After a certain amount of time (I don't know exactly how long, but my guess 20 to 30 minutes after log on) the drives in my computer come up with red X's over them, yet they are still accessible. Now this is telling me that at some point, the Windows 2000 client lost the connection to the network and then reestablished itself sometime later. This has just started happening and I don't know how long the Windows 2000 clients are not able to access the network.

This presents a major problem, the user could be unable to access the network - and I really have no way of telling how long they will be down.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on where I could start to solve this issue? (Besides upgrading my servers to Windows 2000, we are going to start that in May/June.)
 

rbertino

Distinguished
Jan 16, 2001
193
0
18,680
I've observed the same problem with my Windows 2000 machines at work. (We're still running NT 4.0 Servers, but have some Windows 2000 clients, one of which is my computer). As far as I can tell, though, it doesn't seem to affect anything, cause every now and then I will be running performance monitoring or something that is constantly using the network, and it hasn't disconnected from the network once, even though the red X's are there.

I think it might be something built into Windows 2000, like it sees that the connection has not been used in a little while, so it temporarily closes it down to save resources. Once I double-click it, though, it immediately goes back to a normal icon and quickly accesses the network resource.

So, I just figured it was a quirk and since it doesn't seem to affect anything, I just kind of live with it.