opendir unable to display files on remote shares

vcardoso

Hi folks. Sorry about this extremely lame question, but I'm having some serious problems and I don't know what to do.

Scenario: (2) Windoze 2003 Servers running IIS 6 & PHP 5.0.4. There is no PDC.

I'm trying to use this script to display the contents of a network share on server A from a PHP install on server B. The purpose of this script is for troubleshooting. It's meant to show that, yes, you can connect to a network share on a remote server and see files and directories there. This is the script:

<?php

ini_set ('display_errors', 1);
error_reporting (E_ALL);

$folder=dir("//<servername>/<share>/<folder>");

while($folderEntry=$folder->read()){
echo $folderEntry."<br>";
}

$folder->close();

Unfortunately, all I get is this error message:

Warning: dir(//WSERVER.WoodWing.local/Public) [function.dir]: failed to open dir: Invalid argument in D:\Content\wwwroot\phptesting\Foldertest.php on line 6

Fatal error: Call to a member function read() on a non-object in D:\Content\wwwroot\phptesting\Foldertest.php on line 8

Interestingly enough, if I edit the script to look for a network share on the same server (i.e. run the script on server A looking at the address //servera/share/folder) it works. If I run that script on server B, with the same address (//servera/share/folder) it doesn't work. That seems to point to permissions problems, but I just don't know.

I've set the permissions on the share to allow Everyone access. I've even tried changing the identity of the application pool for the site to Local System from Network Service thinking that the identity was preventing access to the network, but that also doesn't work.

Can someone give me some pointers to figure this out? All I want to do is verify that I can connect to a folder on a remote network share and display the contents. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
-Victor

bradgrafelman

vcardoso wrote:
I've even tried changing the identity of the application pool for the site to Local System from Network Service thinking that the identity was preventing access to the network

IIRC, this is one issue with accessing network shares, so it's good that you've made it use the Network Service logon.

vcardoso wrote:
I've set the permissions on the share to allow Everyone access.

Okay, that should take care of the sharing permissions, but what about the actual security ACL on the folder itself (e.g. right click on the folder, properties, security tab)? Did you give the IUSR_* account (or 'Everyone' if you desire) permission to open/list contents/read that folder?

vcardoso

bradgrafelman wrote:
IIRC, this is one issue with accessing network shares, so it's good that you've made it use the Network Service logon.

That was the source of a different problem not too long ago :queasy: . IIS6 introduced this concept of the Network Service logon which prevented access to resources. Figured that one out, at least 🙂 .

bradgrafelman wrote:
Okay, that should take care of the sharing permissions, but what about the actual security ACL on the folder itself (e.g. right click on the folder, properties, security tab)? Did you give the IUSR_* account (or 'Everyone' if you desire) permission to open/list contents/read that folder?

I went to the shared folder and did as you said, adding IUSR to not only the security tab but also to the network permissions (just to be safe) and gave it full control. I also forced the permissions to propagate to subfolders. I still end up with the same error. Any other ideas? 😕

bradgrafelman

Have you tried using backslashes instead of forward slashes?

MarkR

Have you tried doing the same thing logged on locally as the web user?

If it is not possible logged on interactively, it won't be on the web server. However, just because it is possible logged on locally, doesn't imply it will work, especially with IIS.

As there is no domain, Windows won't know what user you will log on as - as far as I know, the only way to make it work is to manually create a user with the same username / password on both machines and have IIS use this user.

However, it may still not work with IIS because of the way it logs on. Try it.

Mark

vcardoso

MarkR wrote:
Have you tried doing the same thing logged on locally as the web user?

If it is not possible logged on interactively, it won't be on the web server. However, just because it is possible logged on locally, doesn't imply it will work, especially with IIS.

As there is no domain, Windows won't know what user you will log on as - as far as I know, the only way to make it work is to manually create a user with the same username / password on both machines and have IIS use this user.

However, it may still not work with IIS because of the way it logs on. Try it.

Mark

Thanks! I'll give this a try. I have tried using forward/backward slashes to no effect. This sounds more plausible as a solution.

I'll post a reply soon.

-v