How to map a network share as a permanent drive letter on a server (like an NFS mount on unix)?

[Sto Rage©]

Like in Unix, can we have a network share mounted permanently as a drive on
a windows 2000 server so that a application can see it . My understanding
is that the normal drive mapping works only if a user has logged into that
server.
Basically here's what I am looking for. A application (client-server)
generates a lot of data, but the local drives don't have enough capacity. So
we want to make available storage on a NAS device so that this CIFS share
appears as a local drive on the server permanently.
If this is possible, can we then also share out a folder from within
this drive ?

Any clues or suggestions welcome.
thanks in advance
-G

 

[Sue]

Maping a network drive to your server is easy. Just make sure that you check
the box that says to reconnect at logon so that the map re-appears if the
system is rebooted. You could also put a net use command in the appropriate
start-up file depending on when the app needs acess to the drive (at boot-up
or at logon).

I can't say that you could share out a mapped folder in W2K. In NFS this is
not allowed and I believe that it cannot be done in CIFS either. For your
app you really need to use a SAN not NAS solution. A SAN solution maps a
volume to your server at boot-up and not in the OS so the OS never knows
that the volume doesn't reside on the physical server. A SAN mounted drive
can be shared to other machines as you wish. If you run one onf the newer
virtualized SANs like those from companies like XIOtech then you can
actually gain some cool functionality on the SAN back-end (such as dynamic
volume growth without the need to reboot your servers).
Sue