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.

Comments

Locking

[Samus]

One reason that those server programs refuse to run from network drives is locking. Last I read there wasn't near as fine grained locking available from a network drive as from a local disk. Plus the performance seems like it would just be awful. Can you imagine how long a query would take on a 1 gig table that had to do a table scan? Yuck.