Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Multiple Redirector Support

Applications access file-system resources on remote systems (often called file shares) using UNC paths—for example, \\servername\sharename\file. Resources can be accessed directly using the UNC name if it is already known and the logged-on user’s credentials are sufficient. Optionally, the Windows Networking (WNet) API can be used to enumerate computers and resources that those computers export for sharing, map drive letters to UNC paths, and explicitly specify credentials. To access SMB servers from a client, Microsoft supplies an SMB client, which has a kernel-mode component called the mini-redirector and a user-mode component called the Workstation service. (SMB is described in Chapter 12 in Part 2.) Microsoft also ...