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I have a WS2012R2 machine with several hard drive setup formatted as NTFS. When I create a share and map that share on a virtual machine where WDS and WSUS are running as drive, on service configuration they do not see that mapped drive letter.

Are these services not able to use shares? If I create a virtual iSCSI drive and connect to that and create a NTFS drive from within the disk manager I can then use those drives.

Jason
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1 Answers1

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No. Mapped drives live in the user space, so only applications and services that run as that user (usually interactive with the desktop) can see those mapped drives.

There's two options here. One good, one terrible.

The good one

Use a UNC path to access the share.

The bad one

You could psexec into the system account and net use to mount the drive in the system account. But this is really bad. Don't do this.

Community
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Mark Henderson
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  • Thanks. I did not know that mapped drives lived in the user space and was only available to the user the mounted them. I'll stick with the UNC since this is easy with no hacking. On a random thought. What makes the bad one so bad? – Jason Mar 03 '15 at 21:42
  • @FrankThornton because you are mounting a drive somewhere that's invisible unless you know the exact drive letter or run `net use` from inside a shell that's executed under the `system` account. It has no advantages over using UNC paths, and once it disconnects it might not reconnect, and mapped drives don't always survive reboots intact. Basically it's one more thing to break, and it's not something that people will expect to even be there. – Mark Henderson Mar 03 '15 at 21:52
  • So long story short, when working with services, it is always better to use virtual iSCSI drives and connect that way and avoid SMB/NFS Shares. – Jason Mar 04 '15 at 03:53
  • @FrankThornton, no. That's not true by a long way. Accessing SMB shares via UNC is a perfectly good way of doing things. Adding iSCSI to the mix can greatly over-complicate things. SMB/NFS/iSCSI all have different targets and use cases in mind. See http://serverfault.com/a/563014/7709 - it's not a good idea to paint broad strokes like that. There's a time and a place for all of them. – Mark Henderson Mar 04 '15 at 04:47