So there is noone here that can propose a simple solution or even any solution iSCSI so I can at least compare them?
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Jože Mlakar
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:40 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Mounting network drive as a fixed drive
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I was not saying anything bad about you 
I was just saying that when I first started looking for a solution to the problem i came upon iSCSI -> this word keeps popping up. And I’m not a native English speaker either, but then again, most aren’t.
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I know. I was advised by a person knowing this list that I should try here.
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I know that too (i hope I don’t sound like a smartass). But since out-of-box solutions are too-expensive and creating my own is probablly impossible (or at least few years away :)) I decided to not use iSCSI. As I said I am looking for a simpler solution.
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Anton A. Kolomyeytsev (CoolDev.Com)
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:37 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Mounting network drive as a fixed drive
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Unfortunately I’m not a native English speaker so you could be a bit more tolerant to what I say ))
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NTDEV seems to be a programmers mail list. If you’re looking for complete end-user solutions you’d
better go asking to some other place ))
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Back to iSCSI… Some companies (like PyX systems f.e.) are selling portable and reasonably priced iSCSI stack implementations. You may finally find out it’s easier to create own (or to mangle existing) software product then spend years looking for something working for you AS IS and out-of-box.
Regards,
Anton A. Kolomyeytsev
RocketDivision.Com – Toolkits for Network and Storage Kernel Software Developers
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Joze Mlakar
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:18 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Mounting network drive as a fixed drive
Funny how the same words keep popping up as you try to find a solution to a problem. I have been looking into your product and even tried it out. But as yourself had stated some problems remain. iSCSI brings a lot more than just mounting as a fixed drive. It brings performance and consolidation. We are ready to give that up for now.
So I’m trying to find something a little less complicated and most of all already implemented. To be honest I’m looking for an end-user product.
Thank you anyway.
Regards,
Joco
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Anton A. Kolomyeytsev (CoolDev.Com)
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 10:47 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Mounting network drive as a fixed drive
Key word is “iSCSI”. Look at my company web site, we have iSCSI target/initiator implemented for NT4/2000/XP/2003. You can use our free versions for experiments as long as you wish. Maybe it would help you to decide upon does this way generally work for you BEFORE you’ll have own implementation )) If you’re not going to be compatible (it would take you 6-12 man-monthes to have
more or less working iSCSI protocol implemented, more of the testing then coding) you can develop own
custom protocol. Much-much easier and less error-safe )) However in case of iSCSI you can stick with
server side user-mode (maybe!) programming and put client side kernel work to Microsoft and their MS
iSCSI initiator or some third party one (maybe RDS?). It’s FAR from perfect (try searching the net) but at least it’s updated regularly and it’s free and it’s from MS… Quite a lot of people assume this is as a benefit ))
Generally speaking you’ll have to resolve some issues going mapped disk way. First one is read-only with NTFS and OSes prior to XP. Some work on both server and client side should be done to “eat” writes and keep the cache valid. XP and up can just report “read-only” with one of the rigid geometry mode pages and it would work AS IS. Second one is TCP stack up time. It goes later then disk services so you’ll have to poll until network would be avaible. Third one is dynamic disks issue. You’ll have either reverse engineer MS iSCSI or other iSCSI intiator to find out how to “reactivate” off-line dynamic disks. Fourth one is with undocumented monolithis SCSI port design. Either spend some amount of time Googling or purchase third-party SCSI port implementation. The same about kernel sockets or TDI client programming. No “low start” from MS in this case (( Fifth one is concurrent access to the same volume. SAN file system should be used for multiple initiators accing the same volume at block level etc etc etc
You can drop me an e-mail if you’d like to talk about particular implementations and comparing different approaches. Quite a lot of them are not kernel level so I don’t think it’s a right place to talk about 'em.
Regards,
Anton A. Kolomyeytsev
RocketDivision.Com – Toolkits for Network and Storage Kernel Software Developers
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Joћe Mlakar
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:21 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Mounting network drive as a fixed drive
Hi,
I’m new to the list so I hope I won’t brake any rules. I was advised to join and ask this question here.
To give you an instance of the problem: As you probalby know windows handles network mapping based on the user log-on. So when two users are using the same computer at the same time, they can have different network drives mapped to the same letter. Or one could have something mapped and the other wouldn’t.
Remappings are done when a user logs on. So if I pick ‘reconnect at logon’, that’s when it happens. Not a problem when it’s a user that tries to do something on a network drive.
But what happens when it’s a windows service that tries to use the network drive. Well, you could say: use the UNC path (\server\share) and make sure that the service runs under a username that has permission to that share. Fair enough until you hit a brick wall called Microsoft. They designed a mastodont called IIS (version 6) that is and isn’t a windows service. Too many obstacles were ‘integrated’ into this ‘tool’. But let’s take one at a time. As you probably know IIS with conjuction of .NET uses (too) many identities (users) to run. You have IIS process user, application pool user and application user to name but a few. This works more or less until you decide to take a step further and serve the files from a network drive. IIS 5.0 brought this possibilty though it never truly came to life. If you decide to use a UNC path to access the folder that is to be served, the server gives you two alternatives:
a) process will access the network drive using the credentials provided by the application user (the user that is running the browser). Obviously this is not an option because you would have to permit everyone the access to the network drive. Although this permission would only be read only, it still poses a threat since the configuration files (including passwords to databases) would be exposed.
b) you define the user (say user A) that will access the network drive and files that will be served. This sounds like the way to go. Unfortunately this (as many other) MS product has a bug. When you decide to use windows authentication on the web site it not only uses the user A to access the files but also uses this user as the application user. When a user B opens the site it welcomes it as user A. Doh!
None of these problems occur when accessing the files locally. So now we are trying to find a way to persuade the system that a network drive would be mounted at boot and known by all services. It could be read-only but that would also be a limitation. I don’t even see why it would be so hard. What we need is a service that would ‘proxy’ all requests to the ‘local drive’ to the network drive. It probablly is oversimplification but you get what I mean.
Do you know of any such tools?
Joco
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