Automating Drive mapping

This was my last article that I wrote for the C++ Builder Developer’s Journal. My interest in C++ was starting to wane, Borland had lost its way a few years earlier and my interest in PHP development was exploding. As a consequence I was running out of new and interesting things to write about.

The Australian Catholic University spans six campuses over four states with more than 500 PCs in the libraries and student labs. So when a conflict was discovered between the network mappings and multimedia devices installed in the lab computers, technical support officers were faced with a long and tedious task of having to reallocate the drive letters assigned to the hardware on each student’s PC [1].

A friend of mine, Namir, who works in tech support realized that no matter how patient he or the other members were, the task of remapping the drives was going to literally drive them up the wall. So it was with trepidation that a phone call was made to me explaining the dilemma and asking if it were possible to develop a script that could automate this task.