Hands on: Connecting PCs on a network

This time I want to share a few useful networking tips that I use on a daily basis to make my life easier, starting with network drive mapping.

I recommend drive mapping on any network because it does away with the need to browse for network servers or navigate your way to the shared folders and files you want to access.

Instead you simply assign a drive letter to the resources you want, in much the same way that drive letters are assigned to floppies, hard disks and CD-Rom drives. All you have to do is browse to the drive letter or specify it at the command line.

Any unused drive letter can be mapped to a network resource and the easiest way of going about the task is to begin at the Windows Start menu. Right click on My Computer (Computer in Vista), choose Map Network Drive and you’ll get a dialogue box shown.

Choose the drive letter you want to use and the shared folder to be mapped. The drive letter is selected from a list showing assigned and unassigned letters (common assignments won’t be listed) while the folder can be specified by typing in the full UNC path or by browsing.

If you want the mapping to be available each time you restart or log on to the PC then select the tickbox marked ‘Reconnect at logon.’ You might need to choose the option to ‘Connect using a different user name’, but only where you have to provide different credentials from those you normally log on with to connect to the share involved. If you can already browse and connect to the share without being prompted then this isn’t required.

Should you later need to get rid of the mapping, right-click My Computer again and select Disconnect Network Drive. A window showing all the currently mapped drives will then be displayed, from which you simply click on the ones you want to remove, followed by the OK button.

Finding IP addresses
Another common problem is trying to remember or find out what IP addresses have been assigned to devices on the Lan. Say you want to check toner levels on a network laser or reconfigure a Nas (network-attached storage) appliance. If it’s been a few months since they were installed and you haven’t made any notes, it can be almost impossible to work out which addresses were used, especially where they’re assigned automatically using the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

One solution is to try using the device name instead of its address. I have a Buffalo Linkstation Nas appliance on my Lan called linkstation. Instead of typing in its IP address I can get to its web-based management interface simply by typing linkstation or http://linkstation into a browser window.

Another useful trick is to ping a device by name to find out what IP address it’s using, which can be done by opening a command window and typing ‘ping devicename’ where devicename is the name of the device.

I’ve used the Linkstation as an example, and it has responded by telling me its address. There are situations where this may not work, for example where a device has been configured to ignore ping requests or the network hasn’t been set up to use Netbios or DNS naming.

If you want a more comprehensive way of finding out which IP addresses are being used, there are lots of free scanner utilities that can get around these issues. One such is the Radmin IP Scanner (www.radmin.com), a useful tool that can quickly list every active device on a network complete with its assigned IP address, and provide quick access to those devices via a range of common tools.

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