mapping shared DFS drive issue

[carrocr]

Hello,

We have a shared network drive on our internal network that I can not get 3 brand new boxes running Vista Buisness to connect to. I have looked and search through countless forums and articles and can not come up with a solution.

The shared drive is on an IBM iSeries AS/400. This server is also our DNS, DHCP, mail, internet, and FTP, and NAT server for this internal network. The vista machines all quickly picked up IP's from the DHCP right out of the box and were on the internet with no issues. the server's name is "MMI" and I can ping, ftp, connect to mail, and connect through our IBM client access using "MMI" as an address with no issues, so I know the dns is working fine.

I am administrator on the vista machines. I have UAC turned off, I have it set to automatically elevate and I have the personal and domain firewall completely turned off. There is no other firewall or security software on the machine, as I un-installed norton right after I took the machines out of the box.

I have tried multiple security setting changes that I read about, including changing the "Network Security" Lan Manager" setting as I read about issues with certain samba drives. None of this has helped.

The vista boxes will pick up "MMI" in the network explorer. However if I try to explore the share I get "Windows cannot access "\\MMI" error and if I diagnos it tells me that no problem with network was found. I can go to the comand prompt and ping, telenet and ftp to mmi.

When I attemp to map the share I get "The mapped network drive could not be created because the following error has occured: An unxpected error has occured" I then tried to sign-on the share using a different user name thinking it may be a username password problem. If I use an incorrect username or password as soon as I click "finish" to map the drive it will pop and and say "Logon Unsuccesfull: Please make sure your username and/or password are correct". As soon as I change the username and password to a valid account for the share and then try to map it I'm back to the "Unexpected error has occured". So it is recognizing the valid account name and password, it just won't open the share.

I have all ports on the server open, and there are no restrictions. At the moment we have 98, 2000 Pro and XP pro boxes all using this share mapped to \\mmi\netshare without issue. All with vanilla out of the box network settings. In fact, the day after the Vista machines arrived a new laptop with XP pro on it arrived and we were on the netshare withing seconds.

I am open to any and all suggestions at this point.

I apologize for the long post, I just want to make it clear that I have tried to do everything possible and obvious to fix this and have read about a lot of network drive vista issues and tried all of those solutions.

Thanks in advance.

Chad

[carrocr]

Any thoughts on this issue? I am still unable to complete the map to this share drive.

[fullotone]

i found this, maybe it helps ...

tweakvista nas howto

[jondercik]

try using the fqdn of the server. Just a thought.

Jim

[carrocr]

Thanks for the ideas guys, but both of those have already been tried and have not helped.

I am still unable to get this to work.