Mapping a network drive with a greek name share

I ‘m misfortunate enough to have to administer a Windows network, with an AD forest. Right now we are in the point that we have to migrate fileservers. Since the previous setup bonded the fileserver with exact server name, moving the file server around is not the most easy task. (All the users should update their links to the shared files, etc, etc, it is going to be a long week). In order not to repeat the whole procedure in the future, I proposed to use a map to a network drive. The server can change, the map to the network drive can change, but the users will notice nothing since their shortcuts will always be on the same network drive.The mapping can be done using group policies, so everything will be setup for the user.

While I was trying to implement this setup using group policies, the simple batch file[1]  I created to add the network mapping was failing. The batch file had just  command

net use z: \\server\όνομα

After some search I found that the reason this didn’t work, was that batch files cannot understand greek names (for encoding reasons). I tried a number of options to create a batch file that worked, but all failed. Finally, I opened the command prompt and typed the command :

echo “net use z: \\server\όνομα” > file.bat

This file worked . I even opened notepad and added some extra stuff that I needed, and still everything works. Moral of the story : Sometimes the unix way, works even in Windows :p

[1] I have read that Mapping Network Drives can be done in windows 2008 using the new policies, but the clients are all Windows XP, and I’m not willing to go to one by one to all the workstations and install manually the needed updates (no central update pushing here). Also people might argue against using a batch file, but batch files is the thing that I know at the moment. (I’m also sure that there is a better way to create the needed file, but this way worked for me).

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