Tricking Windows 98 into mapping a local folder as a network drive?

[shassouneh 0]

Hi all,

The following WILL sound silly, but it has an advantage to it, so kindly bear with me.

 

I have a Windows 98 machine called Main, with a share on it simply called "shared".

 

Whenever I chose to map \\Main\shared as a network drive (N: to be exact) on a different machine, it works like a charm. But If I try to do this ON the "Main" machine (the Windows 98 machine), I get an error (see below).

 

The purpose of this is I would like Anyone on ANY machine in a locla network to assume N: points to \\Main\shared regardless of which machine they are using. This has the obvious advantage for the less tech-savvy since nothing changes as far as how they think of drives. The following image is a screen shot of the message I get when i try to map \\Main\shared as N: on "Main".

 

Is there a way around this?

 

Thanx for taking the time to read this

 

[shassouneh 0]

Oh ASSIGN. I forgot completely about this command. Thanx for the reminder. I also found an alternative solution. It relies on the nifty "loopback" IP. For those of you who are not familiar with the loopback, it is an IP which represents your current machine, regardless of whther or not its connected to the internet and/or has a dynamically or statically assigned IP. The advantage of loopback over your IP is at boot up time you may not be connected to the network or internet, and thus you are stuck with the loop back.

 

THE FOLLOWING IS FOR FUTURE REFFERENCE AD ANS A DOCUMENTED SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM. IF YOU HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM THIS TOPIC ADDRESSES YOU WILL NEED TO READ THIS:

 

1.) use the Assign or SUBST trick described above (courtesy of Alec§taar)

 

2.) Map using your loopback IP which is 127.0.0.1. So the mapping should look like

 

<DriveLetter>: mapped to \\127.0.0.l\<ShareName>

 

Would a Mod be kind enough to either Pin this topic or copy/move it elsewhere so it is easily accessible from within a search box (since it is a documented and solved problem). Thanx beforehand