We have just finished installing Cisco clean access agent and set the ports to live but now I have a problem with laptops and offline folders. We are using kix scripts for login scripts and the main problem is now the laptop goes straight to offline mode before the login script can run thus not mapping any of the drives. Is there a way of making the offline files sync wait longer before it goes offline? or using a kix command to force online?
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Lets go through the preocess:
laptop logging in on domain in office
bootup
login
first script runs locally
pause script waiting for cisco agent to run its checks and obtain ip
at this point offline files go offline
login script fails due to not being able to find server (laptop set to offline)
no drives mapped
Now I know at this point the laptop IS actually offline because it has not picked up an IP address yet due to clean access not running.
Hmmmm... Well offline files being in offline mode should not affect the general operations of the machine whatsoever. It doesn't cut anything off, just reverts to a cached copy of the files you've made available offline. You can actually force a machine into 'offline' mode whilst still on the network, and it affects nothing except the offline files themselves.
So I don't think offline files is your problem...
My confusion was probably because I don't really know what Clean Access is, but I get the idea from your last post.
Could you not maybe add a line to the script that maybe tries to ping something like 5 -10 times (causing a 10 second wait for eg) before the drives try to map? This can obviously be refined during testing...
But anyway, I'm venturing dangerously out of my field there, as I know little/nothing about scripting, and there's no doubt an infinitely cleaner way of delaying the mapping of the drives until the machines has picked up the address!
Pete
But regardless, isn't the problem more that the laptop actually doesn't have an IP when it tries to map, therefore can't find the location on the server by any means at all??
And where did you find that information anyway? When I take my laptop home, and connect to my home network, offline files is in offline mode (cos there's no connection to the server location by VPN at this point). However DNS works perfectly the whole time? I can ping everything by name no problems...
Either way, surely the solution would still be to force some sort of delay in the attempt to map to that location?
Either my logic is failing me completely or offline files is really not a concern in this scenario...?
In our environment when working offline you cannot ping by dns name or print but you can ping ip addresses.
We have a script that is called PAUSE which waits until the computer can ping the switch. once a successful ping has been made the rest of the script run (the drive mapping part) BUT because the computer has been set offline by this time the mapping does not occur.
Aaaaaah ok, now I'm fully with you.
So one last silly question - Can you not modify the script to use the IP address instead of the DNS name for the mapping? I know it's not ideal in case the IP ever changes, but if this is an managed script through a policy, it would be simple enough to modify the IP in the script if that ever happened... Just a side thought?
Anyway, I've been looking through the command line options for Offline Files (CSC) but no particular command seems to fit the bill... Have a look if you haven't already - http://support.microsoft.c
In the meantime I'll keep looking around...
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by: PeteJThomasPosted on 2009-05-14 at 04:34:20ID: 24383682
Well, not as far as I know. However there may be another way to work around your problem, but I'm not quite sure I understand it...
So for clarification - When your laptops are in the office and physically connected to the network, they have a problem where they can't detect the network straight away and therefore offline files goes to offline mode...
Where do the scripts and mappings come into this?
Can the laptop users not just reinitialise the online copy of the files once the network is up and running properly and the online location can be contacted?
I'm a little confused... :)
Pete