Of all the lazy, out-dated constructs still hanging around in computing,SMB shares mapped as drive letters to client PCs has to be the worst.
Microsoft Windows is the only operating system that still employs these stubborn, vestigal organs of 1980s computing. Why?
Search me. Backwards compatibility perhaps, but really? It’s not like you can install programs to shares mapped as drive letters, block-storage style.
If you work in Microsoft-powered shops like me, then you’re all too familiar with lettered drive pains. Let’s review:
- Lettered drives are paradigms from another era: Back in the dial-up and 300 baud modem days you got in your car and drove to Babbages to purchase a big box on a shelf. The box contained floppy diskettes, which contained the program you wanted to use. You put the floppy in your computer and you knew instinctively to type a: on your PC. Several hours later after installing the full program to your C: drive, you took the floppy out of its drive and A: ceased to exist. If this sounds archaic to you (it is), then welcome to IT’s version of Back to the Future, wherein we deploy, manage and try to secure systems tied to this model
- Lettered drives are dangerous: The Crytpo* malware viruses of the last two years have proven that lettered drives = file server attack vector. I have friends dealing with Gen 3 of this problem today; a drive map from one server to all client PCs must be a Russian crypto-criminal’s dream come true.
- Your Users Don’t Understand Absolute/Relative paths: When users want to share a cat video from the internet, they copy + paste the URL into an email, press send, and joyous hilarity ensues. But anger, confusion, despair & Help Desk tickets result when those same users paste a relative path of G:FridayFunDebsFunnyCatVids into an email and press send. Guess what Deb? Not everyone in the world has a G: drive. This is frustrating for IT, and Deb doesn’t understand why they’re so mad when she opens a ticket.
- Lettered drives spawn bad practice offspring: Many IT guys believe that lettered drives suck, but they end up making more of them out of laziness, fear or uncertainty. For instance: say the P:HR_Benefits folder is mapped to every PC via Group Policy, and everyone is happy. Then one day someone in HR decides to put something on the P: drive that users in a certain department shouldn’t see. IT hears about this and figures, “Well! Isn’t this a pickle. I think, good sir, that the only way out of this storm of bad design is to go through it!” and either stands-up a new share on a new letter (\fsSecretHRStuff maps to Q:) or puts an NTFS Deny ACL on the sub-folder rather than disabling inheritance. More Help Desk tickets result, twice as many if the drive mapping spans AD Sites and is dependent on Group Policy.
- Lettered drives don’t scale: Good on your company for surviving and thriving throughout the 90s, 2000s, and into the roaring teens, but it’s time for a heart-to-heart. That M:Deals thing you stood-up in 1997 isn’t the best way to share documents and information in 2015 when the company you helped scale from one small site to a global enterprise needs access to its files 24/7 from the nearest egress point.
I wish Microsoft would just tear the band-aid off and prevent disk mapping of SMB shares altogether. Barring that, they should kill it by subterfuge & pain ((Make it painful, like disabling signed drivers or something))
But at the end of the day, we the consumers of the Microsoft stack bear responsibility for how we use it. And unfortunately, there is no easy way to kill the lettered drive, but I’ll give you some alternatives. It’s up to you to sell them in your organization:
- OneDrive for Business: Good on Microsoft for putting advanced and updated OneDrive clients everywhere. This is about as close to a panacea as we get in IT. OneDrive should be your goal for files and your project plan should go a little something like this: 1) Classify your on-prem file shares, 2) upload those files & classification metadata to OneDrive for Business, and 3) install OneDrive for Business on every PC, device, and mobile phone in your enterprise, 4) unceremoniously kill your lettered drive shares
- What’s wrong with wack-wack? Barring OneDrive, it’s trivial to map a \sharefolder to a user’s Library so that it appears in Window Explorer in a univeral fashion just like a mapped drive would
- DFS: DFS is getting old, but it’s still really useful tech, and it’s on by default in an AD Domain. Don’t believe me? Type \yourdomain and see DFS in action via your NETLOGON & SYSVOL shares. You can build out a file server infrastructure -for free- using Distributed File Sharing tech, the same kit Microsoft uses for Active Directory. Say goodbye to to mapping \sharesharename to Site1 via Group Policy, say hello to automatic putting bits of data close to the user viaGroup Policy.
- Alternatives: If killing off the F: drive is too much of an ask for your organization, consider locking them down top prirority with tools like SMB signing, access-based enumeration and other security bits available in Server 2012 and 2012 R2.
Wilson.tech 