IIS7 cannot use VMware Shared Folder as home folder?

[hairbo]

Hi all,

I'll try to make this a short email, but apologies if it runs long.

I'm running Snow Leopard, VMWare Version 3.0.0 (204229), and Windows7 Professional as the guest OS. I need to be able to have a website in IIS on Windows7 point to a folder on the host OS. In a previous environment (Vmware 3 running XP), I just turned on VMWare sharing, and pointed the IIS home folder to
vmware-host\Shared Folders\my\folder\, and it worked.

That doesn't seem to work in IIS7. In IIS7, I configure the "Physical Path" to be
vmware-host\Shared Folders\my\folder, and then I set the username/password to be the domain\username/password of my Windows7 account. If I do that, and then test the connection, I get the error I've attached.

I am able to get IIS to recognize the host OS folder if I use SMB...however it only works if I set "Everyone" permissions in OS X sharing to "Read&Write". Of course, this means that anybody on the same network as my computer could wipe out that folder--and obviously, that's not what I want.

So it seems like there's some permissions problem here that I just can't figure out. My dim memory of my XP configuration days is that I changed the user account under which the WWW publishing service ran, but if I try to do that in Windows7, I get this message:

Error 1079: The account specified for this service is different from the account specified for other services running in the same process.

...and of course, I have no idea what those "other services" might be.

I'd appreciate any help, though please don't tell me "just put your files on the guest OS".

Thanks in advance.

[hairbo]

Sorry, a few additional notes:

1. I've completely disabled the Windows7 firewall, and the problem persists.

2. From Windows Explorer, I'm able to access and modify files on the host OS via the VMWare share, so this appears to be a permission problem at the IIS level.

3. The SMB thing is vexing. I figured if I set the IIS "path credentials" to be either the current username/password of the guest OS or host OS, it would work. I even created an account in OS X SMB sharing called "vmshare", then tried using that for the path credentials, but IIS failed to even recognize that username. "Everyone" seems to be the only permission that IIS7 recognized.

4. To be safe, I put both guest and host OS on the same Workgroup, but that didn't solve anything either.

Thanks again.

[tinyfly1]

I'm wondering if you found a solution to your permission woes?

[hairbo]

Hi tinyfly,

Short answer: no.

Medium answer: I wound up writing a robocopy script in the guest OS to copy files from the host OS to a folder on the guest OS. I have a shortcut to the robocopy script on my guest OS desktop, so every time I make a file update, I jump to VMWare, double-click that shortcut, and it works. It's not 100% awesome, but it's about 95% awesome.

Long answer: I had a very long back and forth with the tech support folks at VMWare. They tried to replicate the issue, and after several weeks, they were able to. We had a little more back and forth, they brought in some folks from their tech team, and I think in the end determined that this was, in fact, a bug with VMWare. The guy I dealt with said they were going to file a bug report, but that it wasn't likely we'd see this addressed in the near future. This was about two months ago. The Robocopy script solution has been working well enough for me that I haven't followed up with them to see if they're fixed this. There was a point release of VMWare earlier this week that I downloaded and installed, and I just tested to see if the problem had gone away, but it appears to still be there.

So...sorry.

[llbbl]

I have this problem as well using XP as the host OS and Windows 2008 Server as the VM. I am using the latest version of VMware Player. So maybe its good to know that you are not alone, although I do not have any solution for our problems.

I was wondering if you had any links to a bug report or bug tracking of the bug you submitted to vmware?

-Thanks!

[Mikero]

HI everyone,

I filed a bug regarding this issue.  (internal PR 630089).

(originally reported in a Service Request, it was also mentioned in http://communities.vmware.com/message/1667463)

Our bug-reporting software is internal only, so unfortunately there's no status updates outside of the release notes.

We are working on it, tho I don't have any time frame that I can comment on.

[llbbl]

thanks Mikero

[hairbo]

Thanks, Michael! We await the fix with great anticipation!

[Mikero]

Am I the only one who read that in Emperor Palpatine's voice?

"with great anticipation"...  I have Star Wars on the brain lately.. I blame Robot Chicken.

Heh, anyway... thanks for hanging in there on this one.  Basically, we're missing some features with regards to how IIS accesses SMB shares.  It's not as trivial as it seems because stuff like IIS and SQL Server have unique timing and disk-permission requirements.

I'll do my best to follow up here if we release a fix, or if we have a new beta to test.

[hairbo]

How do you know i'm not Emperor Palpatine himself?

Yes, would much appreciate updates to this thread, if possible.

[oschbocker]

Any update on this?  I am currently experiencing this issue, though the authorization error looks a bit different (see attached image).

Thanks,

AA

[elliot__]

I am able to have IIS 7 point to a shared folder as its home directory.

Given my website home directory in OS X (Lion) is in /Workspace/Sites

In IIS Administrative Tools, I set the physical path in basic settings to:

\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Workspace\Sites

I was getting an error when setting the physical path to this:

Z:/Workspace/Sites

The Symbolic Links method  that docgoku posted (http://communities.vmware.com/message/1887801#1887801) worked for me as well, as long as I use  \\vmware-host\Shared Folders instead of Z:/

Everything  seems to be working except for the server has some kind of caching that  forces me to stop and start the server anytime I make a change to a  file. I'm certain it's on the server side, because I can pass the link  to different browsers that haven't cached the site locally yet and they  aren't picking up any of the changes. I may post a new discussion about this as it seems to be a different issue.

[hairbo]

I'd read a fair amount about the caching issue you point out. Even when I had things working under IIS6 and XP 2+ years ago, that was a problem. Apparently, IIS deliberately caches documents when the home folder is on a network share precisely because it can't be 100% certain that the network will be available 100% of the time. From that perspective, it makes total sense. The problem I ran into back in IIS6 days was that there seemed to be no way to tell IIS to turn off caching...which, given the the fact that our use case might be the mother of all corner cases, I can't quite imagine Microsoft ever getting around to dealing with.

As to your specific post, what version of IIS are you using? the full UNC path (
vmware-host) used to work for me in IIS6, but never did under IIS7.

[elliot__]

Thanks for the info. I'm using IIS 7 (Version 7.5.7600.16385)

I've been having trouble finding any discussion to the specific case with the caching problem, and I've only used IIS in VMware so I'm not sure what's a VM problem and what's my lack of understanding of IIS. I just put up a thread about the caching problem here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/414481

[hairbo]

If you're actually able to connect, would you be willing to post any relevant configuration screenshots of IIS7 to this discussion? If you're really able to get UNC paths working, then somehow you're doing something different from me and everybody else on this list, since I think you may be the only person who's able to get it working. Sure would like to have a look at whatever mojo you have working.

I'm 99% sure the caching issue has nothing to do with VMWare, but is rather a feature (not a bug) of IIS. If you think about that behavior in the context of a production environment, it makes total sense: lots of users accessing data that probably doesn't change much. It just stinks for developers.

[elliot__]

I remember having to turn on some extra features of IIS through Control Panel > Turn Windows Features On and Off. Not sure if it helps to see this or not, but maybe it's a start.

http://cl.ly/image/2v313u373V0A

[GeoffRob]

I just got a shared Mac folder working with IIS in Windows 8 Pro. (Is that IIS8?).  In case it helps someone... I had to set it up with a log in credential to my Mac, and using the shared path (even though it wasn't selectable)...  e.g. \\vmware-host\Shared Folders\My Work Folder on the Mac which is shared with Windows\New Web Site\www

I then stopped the Default Web Site (as it was sharing the same port 80 as my new Virtual site.)

Worked.... now I won't touch anything... it took a while to do this.  Thanks for your help with this.

regards,

Geoff

[Nick_K1]

Just did the same thing with IIS6 on Win2k3 on Fusion 6.04. It works using the full UNC path so I can get logging written directly to the host filesystem. Dangerous perhaps, but ok for off-net testing and wonderful to have persistent data to analyse! Thanks for sharing, I was mapping drives and scratching around wondering why the IUSR_ processes weren't able to write to the hgfs mount when I could browse it just fine in explorer.

Given the vulnerabilities these omissions have clearly been part-enabling for years I'm just amazed it's not been comprehensively nailed by now.

Definitely will avoid any upgrade to 7 unless the devs implement a proper way to manage data (inc. permissions) between Guests running IIS and OSX hosts. Every upgrade I've bought since 2.0 has been better but the amount of workstation features it lacks and these aspects are now road-blocks to any further purchase.