WizYo Sytes Net: Network drive mapping to FTP site

What a great place to share :) Here you will find flashes of brilliance caught for all the world to enjoy. .. Actually, these are brief articles describing how I fixed a problem. Every day, I find information online that helps me solve a mystery. So this is me giving back to the community. Thanks for stopping by.. and don't forget to tell your friends!

Network drive mapping to FTP site

I was working remotely on a server when prompted for the installation CD to be inserted. Another time, I had a tool that would work just fine on a Windows LAN, but was asked how to perform the operation over a cable modem connection to the internet. Neither of these cases required completion in this manner, but I was intrigued.

In researching a solution, I ran across this article: "How can I map to an FTP server as a drive?" which turned out to be entirely false and useless. I posted this follow up to the forum: NetDrive works fine on a Win 2000 Pro laptop mapping to TYPSoft FTP server. Apparently these are both freeware.

NetDrive is the answer. It is a free product from Novell which allows drive mapping to an FTP server. I was hesitant to use anything from Novell, but decided to give it a try. It works great and I now recommend NetDrive to customers for providing an easy way to manipulate website files via FTP connection.

One word of caution: Some programs scan your drives when they launch. If you are mapped to an FTP site, scanning could take quite some time (or even lock your system). Use the network drive mapping only when you are transferring files and then disconnect soon after the transfers complete. Sometimes I edit text files with notepad and then copy them between drives without any trouble. Frontpage 2000 seems to have issues with opening and closing while a drive is mapped to an FTP site.

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Friday, September 30, 2005

2 Comments:

Turns out the software wasn't free. Someone must have posted it up on their website mistakenly. From what I remember, it works perfectly. If there is a freeware or GNU licensed program that works the same, please post a link or let me know. I still highly recommend this particular program if you have a need to access an FTP site as a Windows networked mapped drive.

By Wizard_Yo, on Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Here is a direct link to the Netdrive installer. It's on The Johns Hopkins University server, so it's probably a safe download.

http://www.mathematics.jhu.edu/help/netdrive.exe

I already have the app and it works well. I stumbled across this site while trying to find the answer to something that has perplexed me:

After Netdrive does its mapping thing, you can go (in Explorer) to tools> map network drive and map a drive letter to \\netdrive\theNameYouGaveYourFtpConnectionInNetdrive. This actually appears as an option in the dropdown menu of previously mapped paths.

If you check connect to this drive at startup, the mapping will persist after reboot. Then EVEN IF NETDRIVE IS NOT RUNNING (and has not run) if you click the mapped drive it will go to the remote server and display its files etc.

I don't understand how this works without Netdrive. I can't find anything in the registry that helps to point the mapped drive to the ftp server. What does Netdrive do? Why isn't it needed after its original running? Any ideas?

By Anonymous, on Tuesday, December 04, 2007

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