2nd August 2001

For those of you like Lockergnomie Patrick Gallagher, who is familiar with how Windows handles networking functions, you know that you can map a drive letter to a shared location on another Windows PC or server on your local network. But, did you know that you can do the same thing for computers connected to the Internet? Of course, you can't browse resources like this over the Internet with any sort of efficiency due to the lack of a NetBIOS structure, but you can use the IP address of the remote system when manually mapping a drive. Right-click Network Neighborhood and choose Map Network Drive from the context menu. Select the drive letter you want to use for the mapping, then enter the network location in the following format: "\\[IP Address]\[ShareName]" (sans quotes)

This capability depends on several factors, such as the Microsoft client being enabled for the Internet connection on the remote computer. There are also security implications. You must enter an appropriate username and password for secured shares, and there are more strict implications for Windows NT/2k servers, as you may have to authenticate to a domain as well. If you can get over the security hurdles, it serves as an excellent way to quickly attach to remote machines. Definitely be careful with this one, and be sure you understand the security of this because there do exist tools that sniff out these shares, which leaves any data on them wide open if you don't have things locked up tight. Note, too, that this only works when you're connecting to another Windows machine (though SAMBA may be used for *nix systems). It can be done quickly and easily, but I need to once again remind you that there are security risks involved.