Mapped drives in wireless domain

[kpaske]

I am having an issue with all of the wirelessly connected computers on
my network. When first logged into Windows, each computer normally has
full access to shared and mapped drives on my file server. However,
after a period of inactivity (maybe an hour or two?) the network drives
become disconnected and the only way to restore the connection that I've
found is to log out and log back in.

I believe the problem relates to losing the connection with the domain
controller, or the authentication expiring, because when I try to access
a mapped drive (or shared drive via browsing the network), it asks me
for a username and password, even when the logged in user previously had
access. If I try to enter the logged in username and password it tells
me that it has already tried to authenticate with those credentials. If
I try to enter other credentials it tells me it cannot connect to the
authenticating server (or something of that nature).

Here is a little info about my network:

I have 2 laptops and 2 desktops connected wirelessly using WEP (the
problem occurs on all of them)
My router is a linksys running OpenWRT firmware
My domain controller and file server are two different machines, both
hardwired
This problem doesn't happen if I connect directly over wired ethernet

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!


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[Bill Kearney]

> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

You don't mention the important stuff, like what make/model/version of
wireless cards.

Check the power management options on the cards. It's possible they're
being powered off and not reconnecting properly. Some cards and driver
versions are worse at this than others. It may be necessary (or
advantageous) to just disable power management on the cards completely. You
might lose a little bit of battery life on the laptops but probably not
enough to matter. Certainly not compared to the hassle of login/logout all
the time.