There have been a few threads here regarding the mapping of net drives on Windows. I’ve been really frustrated with the whole situation. Firstly, installed versions:
Basically, the network access to the drobo is intermittent. Sometimes when I map a drive (net use X: \drobo\share) it works, sometimes I get “network name errors”. Sometimes when I browse directly it doesn’t work \drobo\share. This is my corp network (which I administer), drobo is on the same corp subnet, DNS is configured correctly (same issue if mapping IP instead of hostname) and the issue affects all Windows clients. It’s particularly annoying when this happens during a large file transfer.
Here’s the interesting thing… the issue doesn’t occur if you have a ping to the drobo running from the client attempting to connect. For example, if I run a ping drobo -t and then map the drives it works fine. Same for file transfers - ping fixes the issue.
I would appreciate some help as its not acceptable that my users need to start a continuous ping before using the nas!
Does it reconnect on a second try? The drives could be spinning up from powersave. While they’re spinning up, you’ll get no response and a failure to mount. The ping could be forcing the drives to spin up first, allowing the connect. I usually have to connect a second time (3 if i try to connect too fast) to mount a share remotely.
If you’re disconnecting during large file transfers, well, i have the same problem. Have had it since i’ve owned a drobo/droboshare. I just opened another new case for it with tech support. Right now, Droboshare is just not server material. Your best bet is to build a real server, and connect the drobo to the server via fw/usb and run a cron job to backup to the drobo…