One of our staff is working on an application that makes it easy to map a netapp share to a drive letter. This application works fine on NT, but W95 is causing trouble. The application is a little visual basic program that opens up a box that allows the user to enter a loginid, password, and shows a list of drive letters to map to. The user sets these things and the application supplies the name of the share by building it from our NetApp's name and the user's loginid, eg, \home1\abc9d. On NT this works great. You can specify different loginids and passwords for different shares and map them to various drive letters.

On W95, however, this doesn't work so well. Apparently the calls that the visual basic app makes are replacing the loginid that the user specifies with the loginid that the user logged in to W95 with. In other words, this app cannot override the current W95 loginid. If you specify the same loginid that you logged in to W95, then it works fine.

We are curious if anyone else has any experience with this problem and has any suggestions for fixing it.

For the curious, we want an application like this because our NetApp box is going to eventually have around 20,000 CIFS accounts and we are going to use the unix passwd authentication rather than set up a NT domain controller and have to pay license fees per user, etc. We don't plan to have any WINS servers know about the NetApp. We have too many different networks at this University to rely on every net being able to browse for the NetApp in Network Neighborhood, etc. Instead, we are going to hand out this little app that knows the name of the netapp, making browsing, and/or remembering the name of the server unnecessary. Plus, this app will disconnect after a certain amount of idle time.

Because various departments maintain their own NT file servers (with their own loginids), we can't assume that a user will always be able to login to W95 using the same loginid that they have on the netapp, hence the need to override the W95 loginid. Also, in some of our lab environments, each PC automatically logs in to W95 on boot using a "dummy" machine loginid.

Has anyone done anything like this? If we can't override the W95 loginid, could our application somehow change it, connect to the server, and change it back?

Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640

University of Virginia ITC Unix Support