We are working on a web service that has to run a 3rd party process that interacts with a mapped network drive. So we have to map this drive programmatically from the web service.
I have already wrapped up WNetAddConnection2, etc. in a nicer class for another project, so I threw the code right in.
Our web service is running under UltiDev Cassini (instead of IIS) which runs under the System account. We get the error code for: “the specified device name is invalid” every time. I also tried impersonating other users in the web.config file, with the same results.
The drive will map just fine when I run my code from a console program under a normal user account.
I have also tried running the equivalent “net use” command from C# with the exact same results as WNetAddConnection.
Does anyone know why a windows service or System user wouldn’t be able to map network drives?
Does anyone know a workaround? Simply mapping the drive on system startup would be a solution, but how could the system/impersonated user access it?
Link for UltiDev Cassini: UltiDev
SOLUTION: I set the UltiDev Cassini service to logon under Administrator and everything is working. The ASP .Net impersonation must not work as planned.
The LOCAL_SYSTEM account presents Anonymous credentials on the network. You could use a UNC network share to access this information, provided that anonymous (Everyone) has access to the share.
You can also install Cassini as a windows service which you could configure to run under a different user.