UNC Paths

[Ed McNierney]

Frank -

It is my recollection that all that chdir() stuff was fixed a long time
ago, too.  I just haven't used it in a very long time, so I'm not a
reliable witness on that front!

        - Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242  

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 2:41 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] UNC Paths

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,
--
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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