DocumentInformation

DocumentType: TechNote

	AppliesTo
	Product(s):	ProjectWise
	Version(s):	v08.01.xx.xx and above
	Environment:	N/A
	Area:	N/A
	Subarea:	N/A
	Original Author:	Bentley Technical Support Group LegacyDocumentNumber: 8358

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAS = Network Attached Storage

An NAS device is typically a dedicated, inexpensive, storage device that can be placed on a network for sharing files. NAS devices are optimized to stand alone and serve specific storage needs. They generally have their own operating systems, integrated hardware, and software. Normally they run some flavor of UNIX and have a simple interface used for uploading or downloading files.

The following is a description of a technical issue that may be encountered when assigning a Microsoft network mapped drive to a ProjectWise Caching Server storage area:

 

Additional information

ProjectWise has historically allowed the administrator to configure storage areas for which the physical storage resides on a non-local resource.  Typically, a share is created on a machine that has large capacity disk storage, such as a NAS, SAN, or a separate server with an attached RAID.  On the machine hosting the ProjectWise Caching Server application, a local drive letter for the Windows service account under which the ProjectWise Caching Server executes is then mapped to the remote share.

Due to how Windows historically managed drive mappings, once the drive letter mapping was created for the service account user, that drive mapping was available to any application executing in the context of that service account.

 

Change in behavior

As of Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, this is no longer possible. Windows Server 2003 now isolates mapped drive letters to the specific login instance of the Windows account that created the mapping.  This means that although an interactive login of the service account may allow mapping of the drive, that mapping will not be visible to subsequent interactive and non-interactive logins of that same account.

(See Microsoft Knowledge Base article 180362 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=180362)

 

Recommendations

It is now recommended that all storage area mappings to remote disk resources be performed using UNC paths.  For instance, given a share file://fileserver/share/pw_storage, mapped to a local drive letter, "G:", identified by ProjectWise storage area name "Storage1", the previous behavior was to associate the Storage Area name "Storage1" to drive "G:". The new recommendation is to map the UNC directly to the storage area.

 

Examples:

Previous configuration using mapped drive "G:" on ProjectWise Caching Server "pwstor1":

 

Recommended new configuration using a UNC network share file://fileserver/share/pw_storage :

See Also

Product TechNotes and FAQs

ProjectWise TechNotes And FAQs

External Links

Bentley Technical Support KnowledgeBase

Bentley LEARN Server

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