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Mounting Virtual Drives as Physical Drives in Windows?
Bombcar asks: "Samba 3.0 is an excellent CIFS server, but there are some limitations. For one, you can get a networked mapped drive, but some programs (Oracle, Exchange) refuse to run on a mapped drive, but only on local drives. I know there are some closed source (read: expensive) drivers that allow a SMB share to appear to be a physical disk. Is there any equivalent in the OSS community? What I want to be able to do is mount a share from a Linux server under Windows 2000 and have it appear as if it were a local disk. This will allow many programs that refuse (for what ever reason) to use anything but physical drives to access the network." Might such software be seen as a 'circumvention device' as specified by the DMCA? The submittor mentions that there are companies in this market already, but that doesn't mean that it will remain safe.
Yes, there is. I've found that several games refuse to run from network drive. This pisses me off.
I've got three computers at home:
This way:
But I cannot install some games on the network drive in Windows so it forces me either to remove them before installing the new one, or buying more storage for my workstation (ridiculous when I have hundreds of GBs freely accessible via 100MB network).
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
> So why is this type of thing perfectly acceptable on Unix boxen using NFS?
This type of thing is not perfectly acceptable using NFS. For the program that was mentioned in the summary (Oracle), they only support a very small number of remote file options. The Oracle Storage Compatibility Program tests whether remote storage implementations will work without trashing your data in Oracle. Most NFS implementations fail it (including big names like Sun and IBM).
Use a physical drive to access the network? WTF.
If you want to access the network, use a computer with a network card. A physical drive is for storing your programs. Also FYI, the physical drive is NOT usually referred to as 'memory', except at Comp USA.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There is an excellent command-line GNU tool out there called FileDisk, by Bo Branten.
FileDisk is "a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP that uses one or more files to emulate physical disks." ("files", meaning disk images)
His homepage at http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ seems to be down at the moment, or maybe I'm just DOS'ing myself.
I'm sure you can find it somewhere out on the 'net, I did only a week ago.
\/\/\/
Ooh you gotta love OSCP. Here's I think one of the "cheaper" Oracle-certified NFS implementations out there, the NAS8000. Only $39,995 MSRP for a 4U cabinet with a whopping 0mb of included data storage. Compare with the free-as-in-speech NFS implementation that everyone conflates with "the" NFS, as if there were only one, proper noun, singular, and it were just free for the taking. Hah.
Heh all these spare-bedroom Linux hackers these days seem to forget there's like, entire different universes of product line and reliability standards that have nothing to do with some home-brew NFS rigjob. I guess I didn't really learn that lesson either till I spent some time working in the corporate IT world...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Subst won't really help here (it still shows as a generic 'network drive'). Its the same issue as trying to run a defrag on a subst drive which is really a subst of a volume mounted as a directory rather than a drive letter.
Not unless you can pull some serious magic out of your ass :)
Unfortunatly, JUNCTION won't let you mount network shares into an existing drive tree.
I freekin' wish. *sigh*
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Running databases (and both Oracle and Exchange are database applications) on a network mapped drive is a horrendously bad idea.
Database apps rely heavily on the fact that when a write completes locally the data that was written has been committed to the destination disk. If this part of the contract is not upheld, then database corruption can occur. I can't speak for Samba 3.0 (or NT server) but there are downlevel CIFS servers that can't guarantee that a write doesn't complete until after the data has been physically secured to disk.
In addition, network links are notoriously unstable. Transient network events occur that can cause connections to disconnect spontaneously (it doesn't happen often, but it DOES happen). When errors occur on a local file, the file write (or more likely read) fails, and the app can deal with it. When the same errors occur over a network, the file handle used for the database is invalidated.
The reason for this is that since the connection is dropped, the file is closed on the server, and all locks on the file are invalidated).
Once the file is closed on the server there's nothing that prevents another application from coming in and altering the contents of the file and thus making the contents of the file on disk be inconsistant with the contents of the database from Oracle's point-of-view. And as a result, database corruption occurs.
There are mitigation techniques that can be used in the network filesystem on the client side to attempt to auto-reopen the file, but to my knowledge the windows client doesn't do them (because the potential for getting it wrong outweighs the benefits of auto-reopening the files).
Needless to say, neither Oracle or Exchange deals very well with their database files being summarily closed out from under them (they puke royally actually). Which means that a transient network event (the single router between the Exchange Server and the file server failing) will cause your email database to be lost.
Not a pretty picture. There's a REALLY good reason that both Oracle and Exchange server refuse to allow their files to be opened on networked drives. Believe it or not the guys that wrote the database apps really do know what they're doing.