Persistent drive mappings do not work with Client for NFS

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Persistent drive mappings do not work with Client for NFS

After SFU 3.5 was shipped, there have been a lot of changes in Windows networking client stack. Some of these changes affected the way persistent drive mappings for NFS shares are handled in Windows and as a result, it doesn’t work anymore. Fortunately, there a simpler workarounds for this issue and the development efforts was redirected to improve the Client for NFS component to make it more useful. I will discuss a few of them below –

  1. Add them as Network Locations – Network locations appear under the Computer along with your disk and CD/DVD drives and are usable by all Windows applications. The only exceptions are the command line applications which do not have a way to access these network locations. To add a network location, follow the steps below –

    1. Open “Computer”

    2. Right click on empty area and select “Add a network location”

    3. Click Next, select “Choose a custom network location” and in the next screen, type the complete UNC path of the NFS share and click Next.

    4. On this screen, type a friendly name and click Finish on the next screen.

    5. Use a scheduled task – you can use a CMD script as a scheduled task in Windows that runs at every logon to map a drive to the NFS share. This can help if you have a requirement to assign a drive letter to a NFS location. Following is what this CMD script should contain –

      mount \\nfs-server\nfs-share X:

    6. Create symlink to NFS share – this option works really well on Windows Vista and later. Just run the following command to create a symlink -

      mklink /D C:\nfs-link \\nfs-server\nfs-share

      Now, every kind of application will be able to access the contents on the NFS share using the path C:\nfs-link.

All of the above are one time operations and can serve the purpose for different scenarios. Drop us a suggestion at dsix [at] microsoft [dot] com, if you have any other suggestions to add to the above.