Login scripts and network drive woes 1

[primate]

Hi,

I have two legacy applications that require absolute drive mappings ie. a drive letter, (U, in order to function. Both these applications exist as published Citrix applications, which users across my organisation connect to using VPN's.

For most sites this is fine but my Win2K domain is also split over two AD and geographical sites, linked by VPN.

I do not want users in the remote AD site having to map the U: drive over the VPN because their domain logins would be slowed down. So I setup a batch file to map the necessary drives and placed it in the startup folder so it is processed only when remote users login to the Citrix server and not when they login to the domain.

The problem with this is that since the scripts in the startup folder aren't processed til the user is fully logged in, if a user tries to access one of the Citrix applications that requires the U: drive mapping, Citrix appears to try to access the U: drive before it is mapped and the application errors out.

I don't want my users to have to use a Citrix desktop to access these applications and nor do I want drives being mapped across a VPN link for the aforementioned reason. Does anyone have any suggestions how I can get these scripts processed early enough so the applications start successfully?

 

[Jontmke]

Can't you put these in the login script of the metaframe server? Or call these alternative scripts from the primary?

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[jcneil1]

Ok if I understand you correctly, you want the users to map the network drives only during the Citrix session- and have these mappings occur before the runn the apps. I would create a GPO that contains the logon script and apply the GPO to the Citrix server(s). Then I would enable the Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon\run logon scripts synchronously option in the GPO that will make sure the scripts are finished before the user is actually logged in.

Hope this helps.

 

[elevil]

Perhaps you could move the drive mapping back to the login script, but use something like this:

IF NOT EXIST "%Systemroot%\System32\tsadmin.exe" NET USE U: /HOME

 

[Ogi]

On the citrix server there is a file in ?:\Winnt\System32 called usrlogon.cmd

Alter this file and insert your mappings inside this file after the Echo Off line.

That should ensure your mappings are done for everyone when logging on.

Does that help any?

Cheers,
Carl.

 

[primate]

Whoaa, loads of suggestions, thanks for the help....I'm out of the office all week, but I will give these a try when I get back in

 

[primate]

I tried the suggestions in reverse order, and Ogi's worked a treat. Thanks

I had previously tried applying the script through a GPO but although the script was applied to the server through the computer config node of the GPO, it only seemed to work when I logged in as administrator (the administrator accoutn has no login script applying to it normally, so the fact that the drives appeared verifies this), there definitely wasn't an NTFS permissions issue to the script file itself, so I am not sure what was happening here.