Windows Startup Methods and Access to Mapped Drives

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Hello,

We have Mango 3.7 running and as part of our setup, we mapped a network drive to the server as Z: which houses our config and SQL backups.

Whenever Mango is started via the Windows service, the mapped drive is not recognized and backups fail. If the ma_start.bat file is used to start Mango, then the mapped drive is recognized and all is good.

From this post about restarting from within Mango, I see that there are differences in the two startup methods. https://forum.infiniteautomation.com/topic/4168/mango-not-starting-back-up-after-restart-within-mango

Do you have any more info why starting via the Windows service would not allow Mango to recognize mapped drives? Is there a way to alter the service to do this?

Thanks,
Chad

Hi Chad

Have you looked in the log files if there is anything pointing to why the drive is not recognized, my guess is that it could be a permissions issue.

Hi, Craig,

I don't see any errors. The Windows service is started with the Administrator account which can access the drive. Does the .bat file start Mango up with different permissions? The drive is accessible fine when starting with the .bat file.

Any chance you can test on your side and see if you can reproduce the issue?

Thanks,
Chad

Unfortunately, I do not have a windows environment to do any testing on. I do know that @Jared-Wiltshire has been reworking the entire windows service as the current one had quite a few issues. Not sure when it will be released tho.

Okay, thank you. We'll make due with how it is now and hopefully an update will come with some mods.

For anyone interested, I did find a way around this. The issue isn't with Mango, but how Windows works. By default Windows does not allow a service to "see" mapped network drives.

The way around this was to create a link in C:\ to the folders we have set up on the network share.

mklink /D C:\Backups \\yourSharedServer\share\Backups

Doing this allows us to use the shared drive to house backups and other files. Before, when the drive was mapped as z:\ the Mango UI would say it couldn't find z:\Backups. Now it can find the link created and works well.

Thanks,
Chad