Shortcut to a UNC path or network drive letter over WAN connection

September 12, 2008

So, we have a number of remote offices that currently map a drive back to the

main office server over slower WAN links (2-3Mbit or less). It is a fact

that the CIFS protocol does not work well over a WAN connection and mapping

drives uses network overhead. So we could use a shortcut on the users

desktop to the UNC path i.e. \\servername\share.

My question is:

Is it better for network purposes to use a shortcut to a UNC path or a

mapped drive?

October 2, 2008

RE: Shortcut to a UNC path or network drive letter over WAN connection

I find performance problems with using UNC or driving mapping over WAN and

try to avoid it. Its slow, affects the network bandwidth and high chance

copying large files could fail even at off-peak hours. The better alternative

is to use FTP or portals such as Sharepoint to share files across low

bandwidth WAN.

However I constantly get challenged by the user-community why they cannot

use shortcuts and drive mapping over WAN but I still cant find supporting

documents to prove the potential pittfalls. If anyone have any good sources

of information about this, please post it here. I will greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

Ken

"MattNeedsHelpPlease" wrote:

> So, we have a number of remote offices that currently map a drive back to the

> main office server over slower WAN links (2-3Mbit or less). It is a fact

> that the CIFS protocol does not work well over a WAN connection and mapping

> drives uses network overhead. So we could use a shortcut on the users

> desktop to the UNC path i.e. \\servername\share.

>

> My question is:

> Is it better for network purposes to use a shortcut to a UNC path or a

> mapped drive?

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