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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
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.
\/\/\/
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.