Windows XP and the LAN

[BigJ]

At the place I work, a restaurant, we have Windows XP Professional installed along with the Restaurant software. There's 5 computers on a 100mbps switch. One computer is the "server", which houses the database file that all other computers modify and access. This computer is always on. The other computers get shut off at night, and we reboot them in the morning. Now when we do this, a little box pops up that says the program cannot find the database file, that there's a network problem. But if we click ok, and then open the program again, it works fine, and finds the database without a problem.

What needs to be done in Windows XP to get the network to be established as the first thing?

 

[stephbu]

Generally from a cold reboot network services are active long before users get to interact with the system. So it sounds like you're putting the PC into standby or hibernation.

If that is true here's why it happens:

All processes/threads are resumed in the state they were before sleeping. Some may like networking need additional time to ensure they're ready to work properly (e.g. verifying their IP address is still valid). Applications have to be written to tolerate this power mode since reestablishing network connectivity takes time. As you noted by the time you dispell the dialog box the connection is reestablished - but is damn annoying.

As an end-user there is little you can do to 'fix' this - it needs changes to the application. Application developers can subscribe to notifications of system state changes, such as power-saving, or network events. It is up to the application to determine how 'fatal' this is and handle it as appropriate. e.g. for some applications it could be totally critical - the application should shutdown. Some may tolerate the 'outage' and retry a few times. Some may just prompt for you to retry - with no damage. (Office takes the latter approach to documents opened on a share for example)

There is no hard rule for this that can be legislated by the OS.

 

[BigJ]

This happens with both a soft reboot and a hard reboot. And the systems are not placed into stanby or hibernation, they are completely shut off. Is there anything that applies to these conditions?

Thanks for your response btw

 

[stephbu]

Hmm - that's pretty unusual - like I said the network services are usually pretty damn quick when your PC starts from fresh.

Some more questions then:
Do your machines automatically login when started?
Do they get their network address from a DHCP server? (wonder if that is the case how long this takes - static addresses reconnect much quicker)

S.