Background

adTempus allows you to map drive letters to network resources for use by your job. However, in Windows only one logon session may map a given drive letter to a network resource. See article K00000168 for more information.

Because of this Windows limitation, two adTempus jobs that run at the same time cannot map the same drive letter, unless they run under the same user account. For example:

• "Job A" runs under account "User1" and maps drive W: to "\\server1\share1".
• While "Job A" is running, "Job B" starts, running under account "User2," and attempts to map drive W: to "\\server1\share1". "Job B" will fail with a network connection error: "The local device name is already in use."

Note that if jobs are not running concurrently (i.e., at the same time), there is no issue, as the jobs wouldn't be trying to use the same drive letter at the same time.

Reusing Drive Letters

If two (or more) jobs run under the same user account, adTempus reuses the same logon session for all the jobs. If those jobs map the same drive letter to the same network resource, adTempus also reuses the drive letter mappings, so the second (and subsequent) jobs will be able to use the same drive letter. If, in the example above, "Job B" also ran under account "User1" (instead of "User2"), "Job B" would run successfully.

Caveats

For the drive letter to be reused successfully, all of the jobs must be running under the same user account. Further, the network resources must be defined identically within adTempus, including both the drive letter and the UNC path.

The UNC paths must match exactly in all of the jobs, or adTempus will not properly reuse the drive letters; this will result in  the error "The local device name is already in use."

The following UNC paths are not identical and will not be properly equated by adTempus:

• "\\server1\share1"
• "\\server1\share1\"

(note the trailing "\" in the second path, which makes the UNC paths appear to adTempus to be different)