Windows service does not recognize network path. Whats the workaround?

We have a Buffalo NAS drive as a backup drive.

And when we map this drive as B:\ , our backup application seems to understand this and run as an application.

But when run as a service, it does not recognize the mapping and crashes.

I tried giving the path as \\\192.168.x.x\Backups\ as the backup path, the service runs but then a l开发者_Python百科ot of submodules fail because it sees the \\\ as a escape character.

What is the workaround so that the windows service can see the mapped drive.

I am trying to run zip.exe via a CreateProcess();

""C:\Users\jvenkatraj\Documents\SQLite\Debug\zip.exe" -9 -q -g -u "\\\192.168.123.60\Backup\store\location1\50\f2\25\43\d8\88\b9\68\49\8d\2b\d0\08\9e\7e\df\z.zip" "\\\192.168.123.60\Backup\store\temp\SPD405.tmp\file_contents""

The backslashes are messing with the quotes. And it is a WCHAR type, and I can't change it to any other type, else I will have to redefine this elsewhere as well. How many backslashes should I use?

You can map a network drive inside the service itself using the WNetAddConnection2 API function.

Create a symbolic link somewhere to the NAS share:

mklink /D c:\nas-backups \\192.168.x.x\Backups

and point your backup application to c:\nas-backups\etc.

Try running your service under a user that "sees" the network, such as the "Network Service" user or even as the "human" user that mapped the network drive.

The easiest way to do this would probably be to access the network path

string path = @"\\192.168.x.x\Backups\";

Another thing you have to make sure of is that the service has access to this path. If your service is logged in as a user that does NOT have access you have to change logon credentials of the service to a user/domain account that does have access to this path.