php read directory of networked machine

joshd963

Does anybody know if there is a loop around not being able to readdir on a different machine to the localhost? IE... Server1 has apache.. and i want to readdir on Server2?

lengthy description begins here, if you are bored:

OK, so i have a bit of an awkward setup.

So i have two windows 2003 servers...

Server1:
running the webserver.. apache.. php.. mysql database... and also Imagemagick.. and the phmagick wrapper.
Ive got our intranet running on this..

Server2:
This is where our shared pictures are stored, which i want to show on the intranet.
running an IIS server (i dont have a website on this.. using IIS for other stuff)
i have aliased a virtual directory in IIS so that i can put in 192.168.168.3/publicarea and its actually going to D:\Public..
you get the idea.

so now the problem:
I am using PHMagick to create thumbnails for each picture.. (as it was loading slowly and being very laggy). I have a cronjob that will run every hour and check the picture directories and check dates etc. and then decide what action to take... ie, make thumbnail directory .. just make thumbnail.. etc.

SO ANYWAY. I have this working fine locally on my test machine. But of course... my test machine does not have the hurdle of grabbing the images off a different machine.
So on the live machine i created a test script that points directly to one image rather than the whole readdir() thing.. that works fine.

the problem i'm having is with the read dir bit. Is there ANY WAY, that my apache can read a directory of a different machine and grab a list of files? I know it probably isn't able to for the security reasons that go without saying..

but i'm wondering if there's a loop around this... since the other server is local... any ideas?

Thank you.

bradgrafelman

What do you mean by "read a directory" ? Are you talking about a directory listing provided by the IIS webserver, or are you actually talking about reading a shared Windows folder over the network?

dalecosp

Mount the "other machine's" drive via SMB ... what Windows calls (called?) "Mapped Drives", "Shared Folders", or somesuch. PHP should be able to read the directory just as if it was a local drive.

bradgrafelman

There's actually no need to even mount the drive - PHP is perfectly capable of reading UNC paths directly (since that's all a "mapped drive" really is - just a shortcut to a UNC path on the network).

However, if that is indeed what we're talking about, there are some security/ACL issues that need to be addressed first.

dalecosp

bradgrafelman;10970961 wrote:
There's actually no need to even mount the drive - PHP is perfectly capable of reading UNC paths directly (since that's all a "mapped drive" really is - just a shortcut to a UNC path on the network).

However, if that is indeed what we're talking about, there are some security/ACL issues that need to be addressed first.

True 'nuff. That said, mounting/mapping the drive might get around some of those. Windows remembers the credentials used in that case.

bradgrafelman

dalecosp;10970967 wrote:
That said, mounting/mapping the drive might get around some of those. Windows remembers the credentials used in that case.

The permissions used to map the drive won't matter, though, since it'll be the calling process' permissions that the ACL will apply to.