Bdrive Server unavailabilty, UNC drive names and Windows Server 2016

NetDrive3
1

I am a long-time NETDrive2 user and am now evaluating a trial of the personal version of NetDrive3 on Win Server2012R2.

I have a few initial questions.

  1. What happens if your account servers are unavailable? I am using ‘stay logged in’ and ‘mount on boot’. Will I still be able to mount drives following a reboot if your server is down?

  2. Why, when I connect a drive manually via the NetDrive3 GUI, do my UNC drive descriptions have my username appended to the specified label? The UNC ends up in the form \ServerName\Label-Username. This means the UNC descriptor changes whenever a different user reconnects a drive and makes it impossible to reference programmatically. Can this behaviour be disabled in config?

  3. We will shortly commission a new server using Windows Server2016. Are there any known issues with SFTP drive configuration on NetDrive3.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

2

You should access your drive even if NetDrive server is down, while your drive connected with ‘mount on boot’.

Because that’ll allow another user on same computer tries to mount same label. You can not disable it currently.

We don’t have known issues with current release, but beta version has known issues.

Thanks!

3

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Can you expand a little on your second answer regarding the UNC name? When the drive mounts from boot, it doesn’t have the username appended. If I then disconnect it and re-connect it, it now has my username appended… the drive has changed it’s name, even though it’s the same entity. Are you saying this is just in case another user on the same machine happens to use the same Label for a different drive? I don’t see how that works, because if both drives are selected to mount on boot, they will both have the same name, because the username won’t be appended.
Our applications apply the UNC description in scripts and when the UNC changes, the applications can no longer find the drives.
Any clarifications or suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks.

4

Windows does not allow same UNC name, that’s why we append user name to UNC name.

I recommend to use drive letter when locate drive. Do you have any specific reason to use UNC name?

5

Hi Alex,

Fair enough. By appending the Username, it feels a bit like you have solved a problem that didn’t need solving. I don’t really see why connections would have the same name, and, as mentioned previously, what happens if they are both set set to mount on boot? Surely it’s easier just to ensure different users can’t select the same label name for different drives? Instead you have ended up with inconsistent UNC drive names.
Unfortunately our application insists on using a network share and validates the entry to ensure it is in the form of a UNC. This was one of the main reasons we started using NetDrive several years ago, as it provided the option to mount SFTP based endpoints as network shares. Of course, you don’t append usernames to the labels in NetDrive2.
We will just have to try to approach the issue from the other end and see if we can get our application provider to provide greater flexibility in their app.
Thanks anyway.

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