accessing mapped drives in ASP.NET application

[Farooq Khan]

hi,
is there any way i can access mapped drive through ASP.NET application?? i
have tried doing that the standard way but didnt work, used the same code in
win32 application and it worked fine though.
thanks
Farooq Khan

 

[Raterus]

Well you are in the right place, though this can be a pain, so be prepared.

First, I wouldn't access "mapped" drives, like N:\, but shares, "\\servername\share", those are UNC paths, and much more compatible than using drive names, since the account that is accessing them doesn't need to have them mapped.

As for actually having permissions to access them, that really depends on how you have set up the security in your application, can you explain what you are after?

 

[Farooq Khan]

well Raterus....it goes like this...its an intranet application actually and
i have got a Novell Netware file server running that holds some files this
application is after. this application uses a component that is supposed to
access those files. what i have done is that i have mapped the drive from
Netware Server that i thought my application would be able to use. but seems
like this isnt going to happen that easily. for testing purpose i tried
accessing Windows mapped folder but failed there as well. as far as
authentication mode is concerned, i'm using the default settings. by the wat
how can i use UNC?? how am i gonna tell my application what user/pwd to use
while accessing the folder??? is it to be configured in IIS??
PLEASE HELP ME.
thanks
Farooq Khan


Well you are in the right place, though this can be a pain, so be prepared.

First, I wouldn't access "mapped" drives, like N:\, but shares,
"\\servername\share", those are UNC paths, and much more compatible than
using drive names, since the account that is accessing them doesn't need to
have them mapped.

As for actually having permissions to access them, that really depends on
how you have set up the security in your application, can you explain what
you are after?

 

[Raterus]

Novell Netware file server..you got me on this one as I haven't seen anyone accessing these from asp.net applications. (That is not to say it can't be done)

My first suggestion would be to move this to a windows file server, but I realize that this probably can't be done easily..

I'm not sure how to use UNC paths with novell networks, if they are even supported.
Sorry I could not be more of a help...

 

[Farooq Khan]

Raterus,
can u tell me how to use UNC path for the windows??? i beleive that it
wouldnt be anything different for Netware.
Thnaks,
Farooq Khan

Novell Netware file server..you got me on this one as I haven't seen anyone
accessing these from asp.net applications. (That is not to say it can't be
done)

My first suggestion would be to move this to a windows file server, but I
realize that this probably can't be done easily..

I'm not sure how to use UNC paths with novell networks, if they are even
supported.
Sorry I could not be more of a help...

 

[Raterus]

Use it just like you would a normal path It would be like this..

instead of
"r:\file.txt"
where the R: drive is mapped to the share "share" on "servername"

use this
"\\servername\share\file.txt"

One caveat to this is if you ever change the server (and thus the servername), the code will have to be changed too.