Windows Mapping

We have always had our servers in-house. We recently deployed some production machines to a datacenter. These serve as our live environment. We have some development machines that depend on mapped drives to the database server (in the datacenter) that are in our office.

What is the best way (if there is one) to map a drive from a machine in our office to our database server within the datacenter?

All machines are running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

What is the connection between the data centre and the office? Wires 100Mb/s, Wireless, WAN, or Internet connection? If the latter, what type of connection?

Are the datacentre servers in the same Windows domain as the computers in the Office?

 

The servers are in different geographical locations. Our office is t-1, and dont have the specs on the datacenter right now.

We have all the machines setup as stand-alone.

 

Mapping drives over a WAN link isn't a good design. Mapping creates a maintained link to the remote resource. Each PC will continually check the mapping and do search ahead tasks on it. This means a greater than necessary use of bandwidth over the WAN. Also these tasks will be slow because of the reduced bandwidth and increased latencies over WAN, and your computers will slow down while they wait for these tasks to complete. Opening Windows Explorer can slow significantly if you have slow map links set up.

Having said that, if a mapping is the only way to get your systems to work then you have little choice but to set them up until you can find a better alternative.

Personally, I'd probably use local scripts so users can easily set up the mapping while they need them and tear them down when they've finished the task that requires the mapping.

The other part of the problem is permissions. If the systems are standalone you will probably need to specify log-on credentials on each connection.

Have a look at net use (net use /? gives a guide to syntax for this command). It can be used within a script and allows for log-on credentials to be specified for each use.

It would probably be best to connect on IP address (which means the servers will need static IP addresses) to reduce the naming overhead. i.e. \\ipaddress\sharename

 

Thank you very much for the reply.

I should have specified earlier- these would not need to be constant connections...in the datacenter, we have our main database server and our main web server. The mapped connections would only be used for our development servers (in the office). This means the programmers would only need the mapped connection for testing and only for short periods of time.

 

Then a simple batch file that used net use to set up the mappings would be perfect. A second batch file can be used to tear down the mappings when you are done (using the /delete switch).

Have a look at this reference for usage of net use:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_use.mspx?mfr=true

 

Thank you very much. I will give that a shot.