OS 9 Filesharing Strange Behavior

legacyb4

Registered
I'm working on helping a friend resolve some OS 9-based filesharing problems in his office.

There are something like 15-20 OS 9 machines all using Personal File Sharing to distribute files between themselves.

The problem is something like this:

My friend (let's call him John) opens up Network browser.

He sees the list of machines available for connecting to and decides to choose Jane's machine. He logs in with a preset user name and password and is shown a list of folders (in this case, 1) which he can mount. Double-clicking on the folder, it then is mounted on his desktop.

Next, he scrolls down the list and opens David's computer but for some reason, he sees Jane's shared folder listed under David's computer. Working his way down the list of users, he sees only Jane's folder under all other machines. What's interesting is that once a volume is mounted, he is not prompted to authenticate to each of the machines he looks at.

Only by unmounting Jane's drive can he then authenticate to another machine and see/mount a new share.

On a test machine set up on the network, this doesn't cause any problems.

Thanks in advance.
 
Some additional information:

The network has a DHCP server running on NT and the problems started when they rolled out a bank of G4 machines (funnily enough, the problems exist connecting TO and from the G4 machines only).

Cheers.
 
Another way to view the symptom is to use the Chooser to authenticate and mount a volume from one of the G4 machines.

Trying to access another G4 with a shared volume brings up the login box with name/password already entered and unable to edit.

Is there a System 9 settings that prevents you from mounting multiple volumes?

Cheers.
 
Well, figured out the problem...

Looks like the guy who had set up the machines had copied over the Users and Groups preference file from one he had created on the first machine.

This obviously created name resolution problems as deleting the file and creating it from scratch resolved the issue.

Chalk one up for the bonehead engineer looking for a quick way out of account management...

Cheers.
 
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