Windows NT, network browsing, mounting and disconnecting from network drives (command netuse)

First published April 5, 2007 • Last modified on July 18, 2026 • 2 min read • 284 words Network browsing in Windows is a mystery. Sometimes some computers simply don’t show up when browsing a network. This seems to be especially true for Linux servers. Under newer versions of the Windows OS (2000, XP), you can connect to a server (if you know its IP adress) via the mount network drive command even though the network browser cannot see that server. Windows NT doesn’t have that option. The only possibility is to use the “net use” command from the command line. This is uncomfortable, although one can make .bat files for frequently used connections. The command is: net use * \\ip-adress\username The asterisk assings the share to the next available drive letter (of course you can assign manually to e.g. H:). To delete this specific network drive type: net use H: /delete Actually, even if you can browse and connect without needing the command line, you need the command line always when you want to disconnect a share from an NT server. Funnily Windows NT has no other way but to type netuse * /delete In some discussion threads it was mentioned, that one should switch on WINS support in the Linux server’s smb.conf file wins support = Yes. If you connect to Linux, make sure that Samba is running and that the user to whose home folder you want to connect to has an entry & password in the smb database (this is NOT preconfigured even in Suse 9.2): as root: smbpasswd -a username It didn’t help me, though. MacOS X computers (10.3) show up now without problems (older MacOS X versions also had problems). Maybe I should compare the smb.conf files or just copy it over to my Suse 9.1.