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Software Operating Systems Windows Linux

Mounting Virtual Drives as Physical Drives in Windows? 102

Posted by Cliff from the but-what-about-the-DMCA dept.
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.
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Mounting Virtual Drives as Physical Drives in Windows? More

Mounting Virtual Drives as Physical Drives in Windows?

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  • Think Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)

    by unixbum ( 720776 )
    That would be a cool hardware device (a ide linked network card)
    • I thought of that a long time ago as a solution for adding network storage to TiVo. It's still intriguing.

    • Ximeta, SCSI over net (Score:2, Interesting)

      by arcadum ( 528303 )
      I bought a 80GB drive from Frys. Ximeta has stated that they will have linux drivers for what is apperantly a NBD.

      I would love to find drivers that allowed me to communicate with this disk from a gentoo pc that does not require a windows intermetiary.
    • Would be good, I tried to have one created.

      Goal was two fold...
      1) Create a card that allow for full remote administration with full screen, keyboard, mouse ability. (KVM / PC-Anywhere / VNC)

      2) Allow the local PC's CD-Rom / Other drives be available for remote system. (Remote thinks it has CD-Rom available at boot)

      The card would have a NIC coming out of the back with SVGA, Keyboard, Mouse Connecors so local admin could be made it there was service issue.

      IBM new blades boxes system to have some like this

  • Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @09:33PM (#7460197) Homepage
    I'm afraid I can't answer your question, but I have a question of my own (and no I am not trolling).

    1) Why run Oracle or Exchange on 2000 stored on a Linux Samba Server? Having a physical drive would be so much better in that losing that disc during a network issue or what not would cripple your e-mail or database server.

    2) Why not run Oracle on Linux or Samsung's OpenMail on Linux instead of Oracle/Exchange and not bother with the headaches associated with creating a physical drive from a network map on a different architecture?

    3) Is there really a situation where this sort of thing would actually be useful or nessecary?

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gadzinka ( 256729 ) <rrw@hell.pl> on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @09:49PM (#7460304) Journal
      3) Is there really a situation where this sort of thing would actually be useful or nessecary?


      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:
      1. router/fileserver, runs linux and has very large /home exported via NFS and SMB so we both have networked home and media directories.
      2. my workstation, runs Debian+KDE 95% of the time, but sometimes I run Windows XP to play games
      3. my wife's workstation; also runs Debian+KDE and sometimes Windows for games.

      This way:
      • both workstation have minimal disks
      • all the disks are inside the fserver, mounted via LVM (so they apear as single partition capable of holding file of the size of whole partition)
      • my wife can freely log on to my computer to watch her video files on TV (my comp has TVout connected to TV) or listen to her music while I'm away (my comp has better sound ;)

      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

      • I cannot install some games on the network drive in Windows

        So install a TSR (or run a wrapper) that intercepts the installer's DLL calls and turns some or all drives into "local" drives. End of problem.

        Call me a maniac, but you might also want to try installing the game under WINE. If it actually plays, that's a bonus, but meanwhile *some* of the installers can be conveniently lied to, and the installer might work under WINE even if the game doesn't. Then just copy the changed files and registery entri

        • install a TSR
          A TSR? I haven't heard of those in well over a decade. The kind of TSR that grabs an interrupt handler? Are you talking of those? I got news: DOS is long dead in the mainstream market. We all run multitasking OSes these days :-)
          • I thought TSR meant "Terminate and Stay Resident". That meaning does not imply that it has anything to do with interrupt handlers does it? I have no idea what the original poster means by TSR, but I very much doubt he means using a TSR from the DOS days. The educated among us run multiuser OSes these days :-)
            • The *Terminate* part is the important one. In DOS, a task had to terminate in order for another one to be started. No longer. We've been using multitasking OSes for sometime now. Nowadays you can (*gasp*) run more than one app simultaneously.
              • Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I wasn't sure what the "Terminate" part was all about. I'm not that familiar with DOS or non-multitasking systems. I went from using a Sinclair QL (QDOS was multitasking) through a brief Windows period to using Slackware and Redhat.
          • The kind of TSR that grabs an interrupt handler? Are you talking of those?

            ...amd steals OS call vectors so it can fiddle with the answers, yes.

            I don't care whether it's done with a DLL or .so, or by pulling memory tricks and hand-overwriting vectors, it's still a TSR. (-:

      • 1. make an ISO of your CD using your preffered method.
        2.download and install "daemon tools"
        3.mount previouly made ISO
        4. Enjoy life!
      • The trick I use for this...

        md C:\games
        subst g: C:\games
        (install game on G:)
        subst /D g: (remove subst'ed drive)
        net use g: \\myserver\gameshare
        (move all files from C:\games to G:)

        Your game is now on a networked share... if it only grouches during install, you're golden... since subst'ed drives appear as physical.
        • You suggestion will work with some games but not all. The Sims comes to mind. The CDs are pressed with various types of DRM that are not there when you just copy the files.

          Currently the only way I know that gets around this is to create an iso image of the disc, and use Daemon Tools to mount it. DT has the option to emulate several different types of DRM to allow the software to use the virtual drive.
          • DT works very well, but I thought this was more about software that wouldn't allow an install to a network drive (some only allow local install, such as .NET). In this case, the copying trick does work as you are only trying to deal with installed data... for images of CD's daemontools et al are still the best solution though (I know a net cafe that runs everything off DT images stored on the server, no having customers steal their original CD's).

            A question on DaemonTools though, which would you recommend

    • 3) Is there really a situation where this sort of thing would actually be useful or nessecary?

      Well, there are certainly programs which seem to work perfectly on local drive, and bomb out if you try to either install them on a network, or store some of the files on a network.

      Then again, maybe it's just that I'm doing something wrong, but Mavis Beacon 9 crashes out every time when I tell it to look to the Network for the User Save Files.
      But some sort of hack to stop the OS from telling the difference bet

    • 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
      • That's funny because a very common use for Netapp filers is to hold Oracle and Exchange databases. The filers were traditionally NAS devices necessitating that they be attached to a network =) Of course a properly designed network is more reliable than just about any local storage system (Think dual Cisco 6500 series for the core to redundant 6500's for the local storage switches, put dual admin modules in each Cisco and you basically have guarenteed 6+ 9's uptime for the network, this was our real setup at
        • NAS works because you build a dedicated network between the NAS device and the server. And NAS doesn't use the CIFS protocol afaik, instead it uses some variant of iSCSI, and thus behaves like a local disk even though there's a network between the host and the disk.

          But the discussion here was to offload the storage to a random Linux box on the lan using CIFS and Samba for the protocol and server, and using the native NT networking client on the Oracle box.
          • No, the Netapps use CIFS over TCP/IP, and in our case we used our regular datacenter LAN which was arguably better than even many dedicated storage networks, but which was a stock ethernet lan nonetheless.

  • Locking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Samus ( 1382 ) on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @09:35PM (#7460210) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Locking (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @09:58PM (#7460373)
      So why is this type of thing perfectly acceptable on Unix boxen using NFS? Does NFS not fit your definition of 'network drive'? I would also have to ask why on earth anyone would use Oracle over CIFS, when they could just run Oracle on the Linux box to begin with? I call troll on the entire story.

      • Re:Locking (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > 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).

        • Re:Locking (Score:3, Informative)

          by drix ( 4602 )
          Ooh you gotta love OSCP. Here's I think one of the "cheaper" Oracle-certified NFS implementations out there, the NAS8000 [hp.com]. 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 li

      • Re:Locking (Score:2, Interesting)

        by riley ( 36484 )
        Locking under any network filesystem, be it nfs, cifs, dfs, etc doesn't work well.

        Here is the problem:

        You have a single server and multiple clients. File locks are held in the OS of the local machine. In the OS of the local machine, you can lock a file or a section of a file, and be certain that it is an atomic operation -- i.e. between the start of the locking process and the end of the locking process, no changes have occurred to section being locked. During the locking operation, you can also be sure t
        • This seems a bit odd to me... I mean, how hard could it be? Client sends "Lock this file" message to server, server locks file (if not already locked), sends back "Okay, you got it!" message back to client. Am I missing something obvious?
          • At the same time you're sending that "Lock this file" message to the server, two other clients are also sending the same message.

            What if the client that requested it originally goes offline? Do you leave the file locked forever? Until that client requests the file again? Until that client reattaches to the drive?

            How do you track these things reliably when you may have a transient connection to the drive where you're trying to lock files for exclusive access.
            • Umm... I know! "Are you alive?" packets! Uh... yeah! Just flood the network with 'em! It's the Microsoft Way(tm)! That means that it is the right thing to d... augh! No! Put down that two-by-f...ow! Ow ow ow ow ow!
        • Locking under any network filesystem, be it nfs, cifs, dfs, etc doesn't work well.

          I'm not sure about those examples, but I have found it works quite well on Netware.

          You have a single server and multiple clients. File locks are held in the OS of the local machine.

          That isn't completely true, again at least for Netware. An application requests a lock for a file or section of a file from the server. The server grants the request if the file or record isn't already locked by another application, notifies t
          • My exposure to Netware is limited. Perhaps it does work well there. I've never tried on that platform. I did a quick google and didn't find anything on the locking semantics of a Netware volume. Do you have any pointers to resources.

            The difference between multiple processes and threads on a single OS and multiple clients across the network is the level of atomcity in the locking operation. Single OS locking problems are well solved and work efficiently. This is not the general case with network locking. A
    • Keep in mind that in some circumstances, network drive overall performance can beat a local disk.

      For example, if you have a RAID-10 networked storage array on a very fast network and a good switch, you can often beat the performance of a local drive, especially if that drive is IDE. There might be a little more latency, but there's a lot more bandwidth and storage space.
      • I agree with you but I don't really think you are comparing apples to oranges. That same raid configuration local to a machine would easily beat the networked version. Networks are overhead. You just have to read a few articles on distributed computing to figure that one out. How many extra bytes in the packet of a tcp header? How about converting the packets from network byte order to host byte order? Hands down the local disk version will always beat the network version. I will grant that not every
        • It comes down to the cost/performance ratio.

          Assuming you're going to spend n$ on storage, there are certain network configurations and certain usage patterns where using a well-configured NAS solution gives you better performance than the same $ put into local storage across a network of machines.

          I'm pushing the point because I've personally performed the benchmarks and real-world tests for a shipping workstation-cluster solution that proves it.

          The hardware required isn't expensive either.
    • Hmm, what happens if you run a vmware virtual machine off a network driver/share?

      Just install the problematic software in a VM, then run the VM off the network drive :).

      So far it seems possible - as long as you only have one instance running.
    • The CIFS locking mechanism is 100% as robust as the local locking mechanism, IF it's running on a system that supports a locking mechanism that's as robust as NT's.

      However, historically, locks on *nix have been advisory, not manditory, I don't know if Samba has a way of preventing one user at the console from modifying the contents of a locked region on a file but if they don't that opens the door for database integrity problems.
    • It's really not that bad. We have all our Oracle tablespaces and such stuck on a raid server that is being exported via NFS. The speed is only marginally slower than the 1 gigabyte SAN we were on previously. Our biggest issue came down to needing to use the -o nolock option on the nfs mount. Speedwise it helps that we are running it all via a 1000 base T private net.
  • If you are using the volume license media for Office and Outlook, you may want to look at creating an administrative install point on the server, then have each of the clients run the install, but instead of choosing install and run it locally, have it install the core components on the local system and run the apps from the administrative install point.

    The online and printed versions of the Office Resource Kits provide the tools and documentation that you need to get started there.

    I got that to work with
  • Developing a filesystem driver on Windows is expensive and time-consuming. It's unlikely that there will be any free (as in beer) or open source filesystem drivers anytime soon.

    Incidentally, I'd really like to be able to access my FreeBSD UFS partition in Windows. ;-)

    IFS (Installable File System) Kit costs about $900; see also http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/ifskit

  • Might such software be seen as a 'circumvention device' as specified by the DMCA?

    Uh, no?

    The DMCA outlaws the trafficking in and use of circumvention devices, which circumvent a technological measure used to control access to a copyrighted work. All of these terms are defined; you can even read the law [cornell.edu] to learn more. What's the copyrighted work that's being accessed? What's the technological measure that controls that access? In what sense is this circumvention? None of the pieces of the puzzle are ther
    • The DMCA is a bad law, but it does not outlaw "hacking" or "doing things with computers" in general.

      Then how come there are so many lame lawsuits that use the DMCA to try and do just that? Like the recent Gamespy suit for somebody exposing bugs they (supposedly) have been notified about and won't fix.
      • They aren't lawsuits, they're cease and desist letters, which are hardly even "legal threats," because if they threaten to sue you and don't, then that is illegal.

        For my part, I fought the C&D letters [cmu.edu] and they eventually backed down.

        It's important to know what the DMCA actually outlaws!
  • Does anyone have some windows software that lets me mount physical ext2/ext3/xfs paritions in read/write mode in windows? It really sucks that in linux I can only mount ntfs in read only and in windows I can't mount linux drives at all. I should be able to access all my data on all my drives in both oses (I'm a dual booter if you didn't guess). And running smb and vmware is not an option for me.
    • Scroll to the bottom of this page [swin.edu.au]. Read your ext2/3 partitions in Windows with glee. I'm pretty sure it can write to ext2, but not ext3.
    • If you're looking for an expensive, resource-intensive solution (you're a Windows user, so this concept should be sadly familiar), use VMWare for Windows. You can set up Linux in VMWare and configure VMWare to allow access to your regular ext2/ext3/xfs/whatever partitions. Mount them in your virtual linux machine and export them via samba. All of your data will be available locally (kinda - it's fast but still networked) in Windows. I used this setup for a while as I transitioned from Windows to Linux,
  • I'm looking for a tool that lets me mount an IMAGE file (produced with 'dd') as a local drive on a windows box. I currently use DAEMON-TOOLS from

    http://www.daemon-tools.cc

    It lets you mount an .ISO file as a local CD-ROM, which is way cool for playing games or installing software. You'd be surprised how much faster even a network-stord .ISO file is than a local CD-ROM, the access times are an order of magnitude better.

    But as I said, what I REALLY want is a similar tool that lets me make image files and mo
    • I'm curious, why? Do you need to be able to modify ISOs or something? I think IsoBuster can do that.

      • 1. Speed, Speed, Speed.
        2. Install via CD, OVER THE NETWORK!
        3. Lets me game without the CD. (StarCraft comes to mind), great for on-the-road gaming.
        4. Test mastered CD-images before committing to CDR.
        • Oh, I think I misunderstood your question. You want to be able to mount images produced by dd?

          I guess DEAMON-tools doesn't do that? All the other stuff you just mentioned can be done with DEAMON-tools. :)

          I don't seen why you'd need to be able to mount them RW though, read is enough for all that you mention.

    • mounting disk images with windoze (Score:4, Informative)

      by Yannic ( 609749 ) on Thursday November 13, 2003 @12:45AM (#7461387)
      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.

      \/\/\/
      • I really really appreciate this link. I, myself, have been looking for something similar and this looks like it'll fit the bill perfectly. If I had mod points, I'd use those rather than reply-- to be cliche, if you read this and you have mod points, please mod the parent up. This is a really useful link.

        Thanks for the link.
    • Mirror [insidewindows.info] of the FileDisk site here.
      • FileDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP that uses one or more files to emulate physical disks. A console application is included that let you dynamically mount and unmount files. An example of use for this driver is if you have made plans spending the weekend writing an RAID driver for NT but find you are short of disks. FileDisk can also use CD-images.

  • What kind of question is this? (Score:1, Informative)

    by PD ( 9577 ) *
    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.

  • SAN (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eric2hill ( 33085 ) <eric@[ ]ck.net ['ija' in gap]> on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @11:49PM (#7461058) Homepage

    What you're asking for is a SAN [mathstar.com].

    I just installed a Network Appliance [netapp.com] FAS250 [netapp.com] in my server room. It speaks CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.

    By the way, you're wrong... Oracle [oracle.com] will run perfectly using CIFS shares (I'm running it now, and have been for the past few months), and NetApp has plenty [netapp.com] of [netapp.com] documents [netapp.com] in their tech library [netapp.com] showing all the different ways to use attached storage with Oracle and many other pieces of software.

    With respect to speed, it really depends on the network infrastructure. I've got a Cisco [cisco.com] GigE switch attaching 6 machines directly to a GigE port on the NetApp Filer. It is literally twice as fast than the directly attached RAID 5 (caching, etc.) arrays that it replaced.

    I think that Microsoft Exchange [microsoft.com] can be installed to a CIFS share, but if not, you should look at iSCSI. My company uses Lotus Notes 4.6.7 [lotus.com] (sweet, merciful Christ, please put me out of my misery), and it works great from a CIFS share on the NetApp.

    Microsoft has a free iSCSI Initiator [microsoft.com] for Windows that will mount an iSCSI device just like any other SCSI drive in Windows. You can find several iSCSI targets for linux here [zaal.org].

    I have about 50 Mac's [apple.com] on our network (graphics department) that needed to talk with the new filer. Instead of installing a klugy piece of software [thursby.com] to make the OS9 Macs talk to the SAN at $150/seat, I installed a linux box [suse.com] using samba [samba.org] to talk to the SAN through CIFS and netatalk [google.com] (AppleTalk for linux) to re-share out the samba mounts. Becides some quirks (Mac's don't see the linux gateway in the AFP browse list, but can connect directly through IP), it works rather well.

    Look at iSCSI, it does exactly what you're looking for.

    • Re:SAN (Score:2)

      by pmz ( 462998 )
      Oracle will run perfectly using CIFS shares

      Damn, Oracle running on Windows over CIFS. Anyone who does this in a production environment should be shot. You'd need black magic to troubleshoot that steaming pile of software.
      • Actually it works /extremely/ well. Not only that, but NetApp and Oracle are buddy-buddy, so it is a fully-supported installation. Oracle doesn't care where the files are located, it just cares that the file can be open and accessed with stock file-system calls.

        • Re:SAN (Score:2)

          by pmz ( 462998 )

          When it works, it works; when it fails, it fails disastrously. This is a fact of life when working with Windows (the most complex piece of opaque software most people will ever use).

          • When it works, it works; when it fails, it fails disastrously.

            Be careful with your FUD machine, you might break it. I can say /exactly/ the same thing about Linux - when it breaks, there are a thousand different places that you have to go hunting to try to find out what's fucked up. Just because you know linux better than you know Windows doesn't mean Windows is a piece of shit. I could make the same argument against linux, but I choose not to since I know there are ways to fix things that are broken,

            • Re:SAN (Score:1)

              by pmz ( 462998 )

              The underlying point, here, is that Windows is so opaque (binary, undocumented) that it is fundamentally unfixable in more situations, even with lots of training. Solaris and BSD are 100 times more transparent than Windows. Linux is only a pain in the ass, sometimes, due to the GNU/FreeLove folks occasionally going willy-nilly with their configuration files and tools.
    • What you need for the netatalk problem is an SLP implementation, I think OpenSLP [openslp.org] is the best. netatalk compiled with this installed on the system and started with the scripts in the netatalk packages works like a charm :)

      OT I know, but I just installed a linux server in a Mac environment. Note that you'll need to turn on Appletalk in the Directory Access app for this to work in OS X.
      • Lol! The netatalk documentation doesn't mention anything about it. Seems like that would be a good thing to add in there somewhere. Thanks for the tip.
  • Alright, check this out.

    I was low on space on one of my Win2k machines and I decided to install some software on a network drive. Sadly, this particular piece of software (I forgot what exactly) wasn't smart enough to require a local install.

    I totally hosed the system. I finally concluded that some drivers (now located on that network drive) were needed prior to Windows establishing the network connection, so Windows just stopped booting. I tried everything I could think of, but in the end I had to r

    • Use the Recovery Console on win2k and above and disable the service that is failing to boot, very simple and most techs who worked on win2k should be familiar with it thanks to the steaming pile that was Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 4.

  • subst? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by klui ( 457783 )
    Have you tried the Windows subst command?

    Associates a path with a drive letter.

    SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
    SUBST drive1: /D

    drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
    [drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
    a virtual drive. /D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

    Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

    You still need to mount your network drive, but use subst to create

  • How about... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jo42 ( 227475 )

    How about faking out the Win32 API call that tells the application if a drive is local, network, CD/DVD, etc. to return bogus info to the application?

  • YOU FAIL IT (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trolling 4 dollas ( 723481 ) on Thursday November 13, 2003 @02:01AM (#7461751)
    This is a bad idea. Bad dork. Never use a network file share in place of a physical disk. It's like using a spork to eat soup with, sure it will work but why not just use the spoon for crying out loud?

  • iscsi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by unixbob ( 523657 ) on Thursday November 13, 2003 @04:03AM (#7462158)
    What you are after is iSCSI [cmu.edu]. iSCSI standards for Internet SCSI and is a "method of encapsulating SCSI over TCP/IP". iSCSI allows a network share to appear as a local scsi drive to the operating system. So you need a server that supports the iSCSI protocol and a client that support it also.

    This site [uml.edu] seems to be quite informative on the status of the various Linux projects. Check this [sourceforge.net] out for a server implementation
  • I tried to think of a good reason to even attempt this... databases can be slow enough with local drives if you care to punish them hard enough...

    Then I thought about transaction logs. Those would be pretty good candidates to store remotely, just in case someone steals a server, or one otherwise goes done during the day.

    I don't know if they are currently limited to local drives or not. Anyone enlighten me on this?
  • I have a similar setup.
    a total of three Windows 2000 machines connect to a Samba server (2.x under Red hat 8) running a 220GB RAID 5 and a 110GB EXT3 straight up. All program files are stored on the windows local drives.
    Windows has never and wil never be as network centric as Linux, it isn't built that way. although linux apps won't flinch if installed on remote partitions, windows apps will cry, bitch, moan and then die a very painful death if one thing isn't right.
    the three local machine's drives:
    5
  • In Windows the network redirector intercepts calls to drives and routes them to the appropriate device whether it is a local disk or a network device. This makes mapped network drives transparrent to the application. This mean that the application sees no difference between drive C: (local) and dirve H: (network). This means that you don't need some fancy driver software, you already have it.

    This [microsoft.com] should answer your question specifically, regarding Exchange

    With all that said, I would recommend against run

  • Junction (WinNT/2K/XP symlinks) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TRS-80 ( 15569 ) on Thursday November 13, 2003 @12:02PM (#7464431) Homepage Journal
    Have you tried Junction [sysinternals.com]? It allows you to link a directory on one drive to another drive and directory. "For example, if the directory D:\SYMLINK specified C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 as its target, then an application accessing D:\SYMLINK\DRIVERS would in reality be accessing C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS". I'm pretty sure I've read about people using this to mount network drives on their local drives (and also CDs onto hard disks - which generally confuses installers no end).
  • What are you out of your mind? You must have a lot of time to do this, even with a gigabit ethernet connection.
  • I had a similar issue recently when using a server product that would only expose files on fixed, local drives. In this case I didn't care about network shares, but I wanted to be able to expose my cdrom drive as though it was a local fixed drive. It turns out that you can do this using the built-in Disk Administrator/Disk Management in NT/XP. Just create an empty folder somewhere on a local drive, then in Disk Administrator select the optical drive, right-click and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths,

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