通过ASP网站访问VFS共享网络驱动器并查看其中的文件，可能是IIS错误

Question

I have an ASP.NET website, that has to access a shared network drive. The shared network drive is on an EMC path or ECS. The management module for the shared drives is EMC made, accessible through a browser, so I am assuming.

In the web.config, I have the drive names as Z:, R: etc..

I am able to mount them on the cmd line with the following line. Otherwise, there is no windows access to VFS folder through the address bar or a browser.

mount -o xx.xx.xx.xx://vfs/folder_I_need_to_Access_to. Z:

I have modified the program's code, mounted the drives and am able to access the files while debugging the code, in the web browser. However, once I publish my code to the IIS server, the code does not seem to access the files and view them, even though the drive is mounted as a network drive and accessible through windows explorer. I have checked permissions on both EMC manager, Windows and IIS.

Some of my distant colleagues have said their teams ran into such issues and fixed them, however they have no idea what to do since they do not usually have logs or bugfixing documents, so I am assuming, mine is not an isolated case.

If you need more info on the subject, feel free to ask, I have scoured the internet and applied every solution by the way. Like NekoDrive, network utility libraries, among other questions on StackOverflow.

EDIT : adding the network folders to IIS as virtual directories does not work as well, however, I am able to access the files and folders through IIS manager content view, so I assume IIS is able to scan the directories and has appropriate permissions to the folders. Also, the user running the website is a domain admin and able to access directories as well.

tldr; The program deployed on IIS cant access the network shared folders under a vfs directory, while its owner and the debugged code on localhost is able to.

Answer 1

I have finally solved the issue.

In case anyone else stumbles here,

Since mounting the drives was impossible, I have modified the web.config to have the IP address instead of the mounted drive's letter in IIS manager, Configuration Editor.

So instead of Z:\\ , K:\\ or F:\\

now it says;

\\XX.XX.XX.XX\VFS\SHARED_FOLDER

and the download link is generated as follows, take note of the backslash and slashes

\\XX.XX.XX.XX\VFS\SHARED_FOLDER\file_path/file_path/file_name

Because it would clearly show the IP of the machine while the download link is hovered on, I am encrypting and decrypting the link variable during runtime.