[Info-vax] SET DEFAULT iterative logical name translation

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Thursday, October 28, 2021 at 2:30:00 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
> On 10/26/2021 6:46 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>>
>> On Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 2:41:29 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
>>>
>>> The last Windows server version that required a unique drive letter per 
>>> disk was NT 4.0 Server (released 1996, end of support 2002/2004). All 
>>> newer Windows versions (2003, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2, 2016, 2019 
>>> and 2022) supports volume mount points. 
>> 
>> Which are too fiddly for ordinary people to use,
>
> Likely. 
> 
> But then I do not expect "ordinary people" to be responsible for 
> "entrust mission-critical business functions to" systems.

How about a system where the hot-plug mount points are set up automatically as part of system defaults?

>> can cause incompatibilities with some software,
>
> Invisible to software.

You might think so. But then consider proprietary software installers that check for available space at the top level of the C: drive, and refuse to proceed if there’s no room there, even if they are actually going into another mount point.

>> are tricky to set up for things like USB sticks
>
> It may be a problem to stuff 30 USB sticks in a Windows 
> server.

It may be a problem anything business-critical on a Windows server going forward, at least the non-cloud version, given that Microsoft is winding back its development efforts on that.

Another thing is that the mount-point feature is specific to NTFS. Unlike Linux, which has a generic VFS layer which handles things like that, for some reason Microsoft tied up important features like this with one particular filesystem, so it won’t work with anything else.