Windows 7 cannot automatically connect to SAMBA network drive using a shared SAMBA credential

Question

I am sharing (to mostly Windows 7 clients) a folder on my Ubuntu PC via SAMBA. To keep things simple, I created a new user named "shared_user" with a shared password "xxxxxxx", whose sole purpose is just to access this specific shared folder.

So, I disseminated this login credential to all the Windows 7 users and asked each one of them to create a mapped network drive (reconnect at logon, remember my credentials) to the new share I created.

Now, the problem is this: although everyone could successfully map and log in to the network share using the given credentials initially, after logging off (or a reboot) and logging back in, Windows would report that it "could not reconnect all network drives". And everyone had to re-enter the username and password again.

I read somewhere that it helps to make the Windows username and password the same as the one on SAMBA/Linux. So I created a new Windows user named "shared_user" with the same "xxxxxxx" password. And only then did Windows succeed in automatically connecting to the network share upon startup.

I really want to be able to use this simple scheme of a shared username and password, since I really just want to manage the accessibility through a manual/arbitrary dissemination of the username and password.

Is there any way to get this scheme to work?

Answer 1

Finally got it to work by invoking:

net use P: \\SERVER\folder /savecred /persistent:yes

at the command prompt.

Checking Windows Credential Manager afterwards, the correct network address of my server was actually SERVER.DOMAIN, wherein DOMAIN was a domain I set arbitrarily on my OpenWRT router. Apparently, net use makes things easier by detecting this automatically for you.