Mapping/Connecting a Drive Letter to a WebDAV or Front Page website

Mapping/Connecting a Drive Letter to a WebDAV or Front Page website

Apparently Windows XP makes this possible through an integrated WebDAV client and updated Net Use command.  For icing: if you have a Passport, you can map your online Documents folder to a drive letter with this command:
net use * “http://www.msnusers.com/My Web Documents/Documents” /persistent:yes /user:

Tons of cool possibilities with this…  (Now if we could just do the same with FTP!)

I just setup a webDAV-enabled website in IIS, enabled HTTPS, setup a couple virtual directories with pass-through authentication to my file server, and voila! thanks to the above trick, I can have secure, full-control remote access to it from anywhere.

Actually, there was a lot of toil to the process, since there are a lot of bugs and tricky bits with DAV, HTTPS, and UNC Virtual Directories.  Here’s useful info I found when wrestling my share of them…

WebDAV:

• You experience a delay when you use your Windows XP computer to log on to a domain or to connect to a network resource
• WebDAV Mini-Redirector (MRXDAV.SYS) Versions and Issues List
• greenbytes WebDAV resources
• Windows XP and Apache WebDAV, Password problems with webfolders

• HTTPS/SSL – Error Message: The Page Cannot Be Displayed . . . Cannot Find Server or DNS Error

Passthrough Authentication:

• problem with IIS6 pass-through authentication,
• …and the solution for me: Deploying and Configuring Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 with Remotely Stored Content on UNC Servers and NAS Devices

Web Folders:

• KB892211 – Jan 25 2005 Software Update for Web Folders