UNC Paths

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:26:51 -0500, Ed McNierney <ed at topozone.com> wrote:
> Dan -
>
> Well, yes <g>.  You need to find and understand the corresponding user
> security model for Apache, then.  Everything runs under a user security
> context in Windows, so you need to know what user that is and what
> rights that user has.
>
> As Frank pointed out, however, there may be some issues with UNC support
> in MapServer, so you should confirm that first.  I stopped using UNC
> support several years ago because there were some serious limitations in
> MapServer at the time.  In particular, MapServer would change to a
> "current directory" (chdir()) and access files from there, and you can't
> have a current directory on a UNC path.

Folks,

First, please disregard my last message.  It seems I forgot how to
call fopen().  I passed "t" for the access instead of "r" or perhaps "rt".
Very embarrassing, and thanks to Norman Vine for pointing it out me.

I have done a couple more tests, and indeed OGR seems to
support access off an unmounted network drive.  The following
worked fine for me for instance.

  ogrinfo  \\gdal\warmerda\data\mapinfo\mills.mid

as did:

  ogrinfo //gdal/warmerda/data/mapinfo/mills.mid

Also, I don't believe that MapServer does any of that evil chdir()
stuff anymore.  So you should only have to deal with the permissions
issues that Ed raised.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent