Vista, Network Drive Password

Vista

Well I was having some minor issues with Windows Vista remembering the mapped network drive password that I had set since the machine that I am trying to connect to is now a Windows Server 2003 R2 machine that is set up to do all my seeding and file sharing within the household. I know I know, some of you might be thinking that I am selling out on the Linux stuff, well you are all partially right. My server upgrade did not go as well as I would have liked it to have and since I still have a Windows Server 2003 R2 key that is valid I decided that it might be nice to get things working via that route, well I will say that as far as simple file sharing and torrent seeding is concerned it was a much easier way to go although I still miss my SSH sessions.

To get back to the problem here, there are a few differences in the way that the older operating systems networking is set up from XP to Vista. The authentication is a little bit different but that can be corrected someplace in the registry, chances are that it is not the problem if you are at least updated to the (now current) service pack 1 for vista.

The problem that I found was that after reboots that the password would just be forgotten for the mapped network drive. The difference with XP rto Vista is that you can not be an administrator and access administrative shares through the network that is not on a domain without a user account on the server.

So to sum things up for a Vista networked computer on a work group with a Windows Server 2003 machine  that has administrative file shares such as

\\server\exampleShare$\

Network Drive Working

You must have;

1. An account on the serving machine
2. A password on that account
3. The passwords on both machines must be the same

In a domain setting you will not or should not have this problem but in a Server 2003 to Vista work group this problem will manifest. As soon as I changed my password on the serving machine I was able to access the mapped network drive without a password any longer because it was the same one that I used to log into the machine.

So for any of you out there I am fairly confident that this will fix the issue without having to edit the registry and allow you to use a network drive with a saved password.