[wpkg-users] firefox and acrobat

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Brian,

Brian May wrote:
> Unfortunately, anonymous access is the only access that seems to work 
> for me.
> 
> If I try using a name and password, the "test settings" dialog works 
> with no errors.
> 
> As soon as the wpkg service starts though, I get "unexpected network error".
> 
> A packet trace suggests that the username is not being sent correctly 
> (it seems to be an empty string according to wireshark), and that the 
> response is "Invalid user".

Here I can probably give another hint. Windows seems to be unable to 
maintain multiple connections to the same host with different user 
credentials. So you cannot access one share with a CORPORATE\user1 user 
and later on try to connect using CORPORATE\user2 user to the same share.


This can become an issue if WPKG is run from a share. For example your run:

\\server\RemInst\wpkg\wpkg.js ...

In that case the RemInst share on server is accessed using the guest 
user or the user you specified at first connect.

I noticed that WPKG share access in above case fails for me in several 
cases. Windows seems to connect printer shares or other things (did not 
figure out). These accesses seem to be done using a guest account. Now 
if WPKG client tries to connect to any share on this server it will fail 
due to already existing connection using different user credentials. I 
don't know if Windows in such cases leaves the user name empty as you 
could see within your wireshark trace.

My solution to this problem was simple:
I defined another server alias called 'software'. All access to the WPKG 
share are changed then to
\\software\RemInst\wpkg\wpkg.js ...
within WPKG client - specifying another user like CORPORATE\instadmin. 
This always worked for me as Windows never automatically established any 
connection to this "virtual" server called 'software'. Probably because 
I install all the printers and everything else from the server called 
'server' and I use the 'software' alias only to access to software 
distribution map.

So please keep in mind that specifying a username to access the share 
might fail in case windows already established a connection to this 
server due to other reasons (like printer queues or whatever). Such 
connections usually use "guest" credentials - so no wonder you could 
access everything using the same (guest) credentials but fail to use 
different ones.


br,
Rainer