Linking a UNC / Network drive on an html page.

Question

Just a basic html link question.

I have an intranet setup, and I need to link to some network drives. They are located on drives such as \server_drive\blahblah\doc.docx

Using file:// does not work on either IE8 or Firefox. How can I link to these files?

Answer 1

To link to a UNC path from an HTML document, use file:///// (yes, that's five slashes).

file://///server/path/to/file.txt

Note that this won't work in Firefox, intentionally. The link will fail silently:

For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files.

See this Mozilla KB article for more information. The article includes a set client settings you can use to override this behavior.

Answer 2

Setup IIS on the network server and change the path to http://server/path/to/file.txt

EDIT: Make sure you enable directory browsing in IIS