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Web Folders and how they are viewed.

Dear All,

I am the Network Manager for a comprehensive school in Manchester. I am working on a project at the moment to enable the kids to access their home folders from home via the Internet. Everything is going pretty well. I have set up my Zone File table with the ISP and have about six different sub domain names I use with IIS5 on a Windows 2000 server. Everything is set up as I want it and the server asks for authentication when a remote user trys to connect - so almost there...... but.......

When the remote user get access to their home folder, it is displayed as an FTP type page "Directory Listing", and not as a true web folder. Does anybody know why this is? I have tried unticking "Allow directory Browsing" in IIS but this denies access to the folders altogether. Also I have have tried tinkering with the NTFS permissions to see if this would make a difference but I does not appear to.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Andy

Tacobell777

You need to set-up a default document, maybe index.html, open IIS right click website, properties, documents tab and add the appropiate default document there, maybe your default document is not index.html but default.htm or default.asp?? If you have no default document yet then I recommend you use index.html.

You of course need to create this document yourself in the folders.

Let me know if its not clear.

andymellor

ASKER

Many thanks for you help. However I do not want to show the site as a web page, i want to show it as a web folder. I can manually set up a web folder link in My Network Places and it displays the folders as true folders, however when I access the site/folder through ISS it displays as a "Directory Listing"

Am I making sense???

Tacobell777

Then you need to make your links like \\machinename\sharename but you need to do that on a webpage

if I understand you correctly..

andymellor

ASKER

Thanks

I have tried this but any links I make, even in the \\machinename\sharename format, still show in a Directory Listing view. Do server extensions come into it anywhere??

Tacobell777

What you are trying to do I think has nothing to do with a webserver, are you wanting to setup an extranet?

Do you want to give them access to the file structure as if they were at the pc?

If so you need to remove yourself from the web server and share directories which they can access like \\X.X.X.X\sharename
where x is the ip address of the machine.

rmorreau

I think you've done everything you need to do from the server end. On the client machine, they need to set up a web folder. To save time, instructions on how to do so can be found here: http://www.eiu.edu/vce/faculty/webdav/win2000.html

The process is similar for users using WinXP or Win2003 Server

HTH

andymellor

ASKER

Is it not possible for remote users just to access the site and automatically a web folder scenario? Is this WebDav technology?

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rmorreau

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rhrowson

The Web Folder functionality is WebDav and operated over http. FTP doesn't have this functionality, and in many ways is unfriendly protocol to use. My recommendatio would be to enable web shares on your web server, for your students, so they can access the site via a browser.

Unless you need the FTP functionality, remove it, as it is harder to secure - and the average student needs no encouragement to try their luck