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Quick and Easy way to change all IP's for several Maped drives

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questorfla:
I know this is easy to do for anyone with decent tech savvy.  But trying to walk several people through the process over the phone (or worse by email) only ends up with me having to do a remote connect and do it for them.
It does not happen often but when it does, it is a real pain. 

We use several mapped drives on a single server which are mapped to the IP rather than the FQDN.  Mostly because everything is run on a simple workgroup.  With the people in the office, it still results in me having to do  it for them,  right click, map network drive, bring up the old route, change to the new IP, save etc..   Then repeat for about 5 mapped drives.
Then find the next person who could not follow those simple instructions

I got to wondering if there was a utility that could be programmed to simply change all occurrences of xxx.xxx.xxx in the registry under mount points to the new IP.  I'm not even sure it could be done that way.  But since Windows has the option to save the Wi-Fi connections to a flash drive and transfer them to another laptop,  I figure there must be a way to just change the IP used for drive mapping.  Nothing else changes, they have the same username, same password, same everything.  Only happens when the server has to be moved to another IP, usually due to a change in ISP bit sometimes due to reallocation of storage space.
 

Ath:
Write a bat file that does the net use k: /d and net use k: \\x.y.z.n\share /persist=y for all drives.

But you should really consider to start using the server's name instead of the ip, as windows is perfectly capable of resolving that, even in a workgroup.
When replacing a server, just turn off the old server, and give the new server the same name.

40hz:
When you say "server" I'm guessing it's a workstation running as a central share point using a Windows workgroup rather than a 'server server' such as Windows Server?

+1 with Ath. Look at the documentation for the NET USE command and write a batch file the users can just run when needed or the shares get changed. Ditto on using the server name rather than the IP address. Enter NET VIEW to see the names of the computers on your network. If the server name is there, you should be able to use it instead of the IP address.

questorfla:
thanks.  been there and done that.  It used to work just fine too.

The problems are all in the registry and deletion of the mountpoints2 locations using fixes part of it.
This has been an issue in Windows for a long time.  If you map through use of Net Use instead of the GUI, it does not always work as it should.
Especially with Windows 8.

I have found that if I "clean house" in the registry all things go swimmingly. :)

But I don't want to send someone I have never even met off deleting registry entries.
These are usually employees I have to support remotely.

The Server itself isn't the issue.  The sever-name is not a problem.  The problem seems to be something in their copy of windows that insists on using the IP after the VPN connects to that IP rather than using the QDN of the server..  These systems are not "on the local network:" they are all logging in through a VPN.

Also, we have no Domain  and no AD Server.  This is a simple Workgroup setup.

Shades:
Creating your own network topology could help you. See this link.

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