Question

I have a WCF service as part of a client/server application I am working on. The user clicks a button in the client, and it calls the service to generate a file, and then export that file to a network share.

This obviously works fine in development, but when placed on the server, I continuously get the following message:

Access to the path '\\servername\folderpath\folder\filename.ext' is denied

The remote folder has very permissive permissions – everyone has full control of this folder right now. The service also runs under an Active Directory account, and that user has also been granted full control to the folder. While searching through SO and other sites, this seemed to be the common failure, or issues were related to asp.net and IIS. This is a windows service hosted service.

Here is a sample of my rather simple code:

// export the file to path
string theFileContents = "why wont this save?";
string theFilePath = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["filelocation"];
using (StreamWriter file = new StreamWriter(theFilePath + accountNumber + ".ext"))
{
     file.WriteLine(theFileContents);
     file.Close();
}

and here is how I have it setup in my app.config:

<add key="filelocation" value="\\server\folderpath\folder\"/>

Im pretty sure that if I updated my client to receive the string and write it out to a file on the share, it would work due to this setup (as it does in development, or when the service is running under my account in debug in VS2010) – but I really didn’t want it to have to make that trip – and just go from server to server.

Answer 1

This ended up being a permissions issue that was uncovered using the rmtshare tool, Explorer was displaying this incorrectly.