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A persistent and unremedied failure of Windows networking is its inability to reflect mounted shares as they come online. The two machines can ping one another indefinitely and still, the red X next to a mapped network drive letter will persist.

In contrast to Linux, where a mount is a mount, one often must reinitialize the Windows network stack, typically by rebooting or sometimes by logging off and on, in either case losing one's place with open apps, etc., which is idiotic.

Occasionally, by waiting random amounts of time between ten seconds and ten days, the mount will become connected.

One wishes for a right-click context menu command to trigger this immediately.

Pending that, I was wondering what processes must be triggered or underway to activate a connection, and whether those could be proactively invoked by a script of some sort.

I seem to recall several years ago a passing reference to flushing the ARP cache would do it but with the advent of SMB over TCP and the death of NetBIOS and broadcast networking I'm not sure that will do it.

Any thoughts would be especially welcome.

ebsf
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1 Answers1

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One wishes for a right-click context menu command to trigger this immediately.

I think the easiest way to do this is to use a batch file on the Desktop.

NET USE Z: \Computername\driveorfoldershare

That connects instantly on my own network.

Internally on my own network, I share the Drive (Security/Sharing properties of the drive) and just connect to the drive.

If persistence is ON, this mapping will survive several restarts and needs be done only occasionally.

To your last comment, this all works with TCP/IP and SMBv2+

John
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  • That's helpful, and thanks, but what does it mean for "persistence" to be "ON"? And, over which machine's restarts (server or client) will the mapping survive? – ebsf May 23 '22 at 04:32
  • Mapped drives are normally persistent. (use /persistent:Yes in the Net Use command if need be). Normally you do not need to set persistence as it is likely on. I keep my server machine running, but when I restart it, client machines reconnect. I hope this helps. – John May 23 '22 at 11:16