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HOW-TO: Map a drive to your FTP server

by Barb Dybwad, posted Oct 25th 2005 at 2:41PM

Netdrive
Today's how-to is brought to you by Hackaday's Eliot Phillips:

Transferring files to and from your blog's webserver can become a nuisance. Most of the pain is from having to use an FTP program to move your files instead of the file manager you are accustom to. Novell's NetDrive can make this file juggling almost transparent. NetDrive lets you map your FTP server just like a local drive. Manage your files exactly like you would your offline files and NetDrive will do the uploading and downloading almost transparently.


Licensing restrictions keep Novell from distributing netdrive.exe on their web site so you will need to find it on the web. We got our copy from Loyola.

Watch our step-by-step tutorial for setting up NetDrive.

[thanks Gadgetguru]

Filed under: Desktops

Tags: features

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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olderty

olderty @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

I could hardly follow the article with all the color and capitalization...

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John Doe.

John Doe. @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

I won't go near Novell's stuff unless absolutely forced too; similarly I won't go near someone with the plague unless forced to.
Bad experiences with 10 years of the NetWare client has made me swear of anything Novell for good. Great server...shit clients.

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Spyvie

Spyvie @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

What DV (#2) said...

Also you can just as easily enter the ftp address in your browser and just save the fav, then say yes to saving the p-word.

This is an answer to a question nobody asked.

I agree with John Doe about the knitware client nothing sucks worse or has caused more problems on networked boxes

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Neech

Neech @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

dv, that's pretty cool. I've been using WebDrive for uploading images to ImageEvent via ftp. It maps a drive the same way this Novell app does. It's a nice tool but this seems great without having yet another app running. Thanks!

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Fist Of Konshu

Fist Of Konshu @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

You are completely missing the point dv and spyvie. The solution you talked about do not create a virtual drive. You can't make a shortcut or right-click and send to either a network place or a favorite. Say you wanted to back up directly to an FTP site. The backup utility can't find a favorite or a network place. This program strives for further functionality.

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British

British @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Now the question is, does it support SCP in addition to FTP? I know at least 1 admin who's disabled FTP entirely(and frankly, it's no loss) in favor of SCP.

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Tim

Tim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

If you do what Spyvie said and you are using certain versions of IE, and you have the Advanced Options set up to allow it, you can just drag and drop files from your Windows Explorer window into your IE window. This is almost the same functionality as the drive letter, but just using software already in the OS box.

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Sopan

Sopan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

What about doing this in Mac OS X? Having a "drive" on the desktop that is easy access to an FTP server directory?

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Ben

Ben @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

SCP? Why not stick with FTP over SSL. Its called FTPS...not to be confused with SFTP which is SSH File Transfer and isn't even based ont eh FTP protocol. FTPS is normal FTP, but inside an SSL tunnel. Many clients support it, and there are many servers that do too. (CrushFTP comes to mind...)

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dv

dv @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Konshu: sure you can. you can make a shortcut to any network place, but as for the Send To menu, you're completely free to add anything you want there. the Send To menu is actually just a link to a folder containing shortcuts, located in your Documents and Settings folder. as for "The backup utility can't find a favorite or a network place" - it sure can if it uses a standard windows file dialog.

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Ryan Cragg

Ryan Cragg @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

This becomes useful when you are running an application that can only save its output to a local drive. I work with software that can be set up to automatically generate Google Earth KML files from multiple source datasets (Oracle Spatial, WFS, etc), but the file pathname has to include a drive letter. By having the FTP site as a drive letter, I can run the program as a scheduled task, and write the output directly to a website automatically for others to download. Drag-and-drop and navigating to an FTP site in Explorer won't help in this instance.
Customers ask me for exactly what this product does all the time.

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peter

peter @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

as another poster already pointed out Windows XP has this ability already built in with webdav. Why would you buy a program to do that!.

Just map a drive to "http://webserver.com" instead of a network drive and you're done!

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Matt

Matt @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Thanks for the link! I was using a trial of a program called "webdrive", but it expired. I use open office, and it seems often when I double click a .doc in XP's ftp network places, it says it can't open it. This program actually seems pretty much the same as the other, hm. Well, the nice thing about these programs is that it can do CWD //folder/folder as an on connect command, which XP can't.

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MDJ

MDJ @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

I just tried and unistalled it pronto, it will not replace SmartFTP

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Lee Raesly

Lee Raesly @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

#11. #9: Regarding OSX support of mounted drives; I was able to get read/write access to my ftp site (on dreamhost) using the afp://hostname.com syntax in the "Connect to Server" dialog box (where hostname.com is your ftp site). OSX did warn that the password was being sent in clear text, though...

I could open the same site using ftp://hostname.com but it was read only.

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gr00vy0ne

gr00vy0ne @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Novell licensed this technology from another company called South River Technologies. If you want a more feature-rich version you can get it at:

http://www.southrivertech.com/index.php?pg=./products/webdrive/index

It's a great product although they recently added activation on it making it less than attractive than it used to be.

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YourNameHere

YourNameHere @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Yo mac people . . . to get the FTP thing, you have to remember your "Security" preferences will be blocking (i.e. prohibiting) you from uploading.

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Infoclipper

Infoclipper @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

What I would love is a program that lets me assign a group of servers to one drive letter/drop location. So if, for instance, I have five otherwise identical servers, I can drag and drop newimage.jpg and have it sent to all five without my having to do anything else.

Anyone know of such a program for XP? I'm even willing to spend some money if the program is worth it...

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Jen

Jen @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

guys, that's the LONG way of doing it.

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Ethan Trewhitt

Ethan Trewhitt @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

I've tried this program and it's glitchy as crap when used behind a firewall. If it has any problems connecting to a server, it just stalls forever. The driver seems to use a Samba-like interface to emulate the drive letter, which causes Windows Explorer to grind to a halt if there's problem with the FTP connection. What's better is that you can't kill the NetDrive process or the Explorer process! Then you go to reboot and you get "disconnecting network drives..." indefinitely until you manually power down the machine. I lived it, once for NetDrive and once for WebDrive (the South River product that is nearly identical but supports SFTP).

*takes breath*

That said, this doesn't support SFTP or SCP, and it's not happy working over SSH either (most FTP clients can't handle SSH port forwarding anyway because the protocol is so port-hungry). I also downloaded the demo of WebDrive, and it fails to connect to my SSH server. I'm guessing that it requires SSH1, which my server has disabled for security reasons, or has some other silly incompatibility.

These programs (NetDrive and WebDrive) intend to do exactly what we want, but they're a buggy implementation that doesn't reflect the payment of customers who register the demo version. There's got to be a better solution. Samba is close, but I've yet to get samba working when port-forwarded because Windows is already using the localhost samba port. Does anyone have experience with this?

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Chandu

Chandu @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

I tried this some time back...

This has lot of problems. If something happens in network in between transfer it hangs the explorer for ever...

Personally I don't recommend this...

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JBrickley

JBrickley @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Everyone needing a good FTP on Windows should checkout http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/ - Supports SFTP which is and probably should be required by Webhosts everywhere. i.e. it encrypts your FTP traffic, don't want those PHP embedded passwords to fly through the ether just begging for someone with a sniffer to snag em!

On OS X try Transmit (not free, but Fugu is)

http://www.panic.com/transmit/
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

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DarkFader

DarkFader @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

#13: A real filesystem? This NetDrive also creates a driveletter so I don't think there's a huge difference.
What I tried before was running lufs (usermode filesystem thingy) on my server and let it bridge between an FTP site and local SMB connection.
Too bad the FTP protocol just sucks. With lots of caching it should be bearable. Automatic time skew detection would be great too.

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apoc

apoc @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

erhm, ethan, if it grinds explorer to a half then disable the network connection, a few seconds later an error message will popup and you'll have explorer back, alternatively, enable the "launch folder in a separate process" option in tools>folder options, if a network folder becomes unresponsive simply 'kill it'.

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Ethan

Ethan @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

apoc - ya, I enable separate processes for Explorer on any machine I use regularly (why isn't that the default in Windows?). The problem with Samba (well, Windows File Sharing or whatever) is that it seems to lock something behind the scenes in Windows that prevents Windows from even killing Explorer, or any process that is hung up trying to access a Samba share. Ctrl-Alt-Del, then select explorer.exe, confirm "Yes", and it just sits there. There's no way to kill it, and logging off will hang forever waiting for it to finish.

In this case, it's not the network connection that's holding up Explorer, it's NetDrive itself. Something between NetDrive and Explorer is working like Samba, in such a way that Explorer is completely frozen until NetDrive relinquishes control, which it never does.

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cawpin

cawpin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

#22 Infoclipper - There is a program called "DOS" and it has these things called "batch files" that run these things called "commands". Just copy your info to a directory and run the xcopy command, with appropriate switches, to each server. Its not hard.

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George Lazarides

George Lazarides @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

Very nice! I did not know about this utility, but I have already started making use of it.

It allows me to keep my Mozilla Sunbird calendar files out on my Web host so I can access them from any of the PC that I use regularly.

I can make updates to my calendar from any of my computers and the files on the Web server are updated automatically!

This is real handy for me, I have been looking for a replacement for Yahoo! Calendar.

Also, some of my users have needs to FTP files to servers, this can make it as easy as dragging a file in explorer ... or easier!

I don't think it will keep me from using Command Line scripts, or FileZilla entirely, but it is another cool Utility to add to my Utility Belt.

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hemancuso

hemancuso @ Dec 19th 2005 1:26AM

another option is SftpDrive, avail at www.sftpdrive.com

network sftp drive mounting software for windows

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