Last Friday evening, I got the type of call that no one wants to get — or make, for that matter. It was a customer I hadn’t heard from in a while. Last time I was there I setup Windows Networking in their office. In other words, I made a Workgroup, folders to share their documents, and a shared printer. I also recommended Linux and Samba in the medium future too, instead of Vista. Yes, they have Vista everywhere!
Well, this call was that they got a new wireless router and, as soon as they put it in, all the file sharing was disabled and they were no longer able to print. Seemed strange to me, but we made a time for me to go over there and get things back to normal.
On Saturday morning, I asked them why they got a new router, since the other one was quite new. They said it was because their laptops kept losing connections and someone advised them to get a new wireless router. This is a known problem with Visa and have a friend that is having this problem as I write this. He told me that the overall solution was to get a new router as well, and he searched exhaustively for another solution but nothing else has worked. Therefore, I knew they were on the right track. And my customer correctly bought a Linksys, which is really the only brand of wireless router I will buy.
The first thing I did verify that the Internet was working (because if the router isn’t routing, then that’s a big problem). Then I logged into their router to see if something silly was turned on by default that would prevent the machines from talking internally. Nope, no problem there.
The domain/file server was working fine. So I went to another workstation and it asked me for my user credentials (I made one user for all the file shares to make it easy on them). Yep, it wouldn’t authenticate, even though I knew I was using the right password. I went back to the domain server and updated the password on the common user — using the same password as before. Sure enough, that worked — now all machines could get to the shared folders. Step One done.
The printer was harder to figure out. I’m still not sure what happened, or why it worked, but this is how I got them going again. From each client machine:
- Goto Start->Network->DomainName->Printers
- Right-click on the printer in question and choose “Sharing”
- Vista will give some bogus message about “Installing Drivers” which it doesn’t even need to do, since the only thing that changed on the network was the router.
- Print a test page.
This worked fine on the workstations, but the laptops wanted to be a little more stubborn. So I had to do this in addition to the above:
- Goto Start-> Control Panel, then click “Classic View” on the left side.
- Click Printers
- You will see icons of all sorts of printers — there may be two printers that have the same name — one of which says “on ServerName.
- Right-click on the printer that does not say ServerName and then choose “Delete”. The icon won’t disappear but it will say “Deleted — Offline”
- Now Right-click on the printer that does say ServerName and then choose “Default”
- Again, try a test page.
And that worked!!
But why did Vista forget? Why did a simple router change cause such confusion in the Workgroup sharing? I really feel having a Linux/Samba machine as the domain server as well as the file and print server would have prevented this problem.
