Unable to write to a UNC path from a SAP program

[Former Member]

Hi All

We have just migrated our first server in an OS/DB migration from UNIX to Windows and the developers are trying to convert all our jobs/programs in SAP to write to Windows UNC paths instead of unix directories but we cannot get it to write files to the UNC paths.

OS = Win 2008 SR2

DB = Oracle 11.2

SAP = ERP 6 / ECC 6

Example path =
hostname.domainname\directory$

Can anybody help us please.

Thanks

Steve

[Former Member]

Hi Olivier and Denis

Thanks for this it looks ike you're right, our server team have just tried it out and some of the UNC paths now seem to work so we're going to update them all. On the one we started tested on they had allowed it on the File System but not the share. This is resolved now we think

Many Thanks

Steve

[Former Member]

Hi,

can you in principle access the share via your PC or Laptop? Do you may have any Linux/Unix server with smbmount where you can try to access the share with the specific user?

Please note that Windows has 2 principles of giving users access to files and folders! You can define a share policy where the user rights can be set. This will be done where you setup the share itself. Second the rights that are on the files (NTFS). If you have different rights where may your user hasnt enought rights it wont work.

Example:

User has rights in the NTFS filesystem but no rights in the share configuration -> it wont work!

User has rights in the share configuration but no rights in the NTFS filesystem -> it wont work!

[Former Member]

Thanks Tony & Manuel

We believe that we have checked and rechecked all the necessary permissions on the share itself and we know we can resolve the FQDN from the SAP server. The server team here were able to monitor which user SAP was using to try and access these shares and it turns out to be the service account SAPService<SID>. Which surprised me a bit as I thought it would be <sid>adm. Next we tried logging into the SAP server as SAPService<SID> and mapping the UNC path and we were able to write to it so the inference is that the permissions are OK.

I was wondering if there's something within SAP itself that we need to turn on to make it understand UNC paths. We ran function module EPS_GET_DIRECTORY_LISTING in SE37 and were able to read from the UNC path. But as yet we can't get any of our SAP programs to write to them.

Thanks

Steve

[Former Member]

Hi,

We are running all our SAP systems on Windows and use UNC paths successfully with many interface abap programs.

As you already found out, the SAP OS user is sapservice<SID>.

You have to check that the write authorizations are OK both at the share level and at the file system level.

One other classical point which is worth checking, is that several standard SAP programs use too short variables to hold the complete UNC path. Therefore the path is truncated and the program fails...

Regards,

Olivier

[xymanuel]

Hi Steven,

did you check the permissions of the Share?

The User, under which the Application Server runs, should have access to it.

Kind regads

Manuel

[Former Member]

Steve,

My immediate rection would be to check that it is resolving the name correctly. It does happen that occasionally you will get some slight issues with this. I would then check the security / share permissions on the target site to make sure that the share (directory$) does have the right permissions for the SAP server to be able to write to it.

I'm sure that you'll think these are a bit obvious, but my experience is that these are more often the problem than more complex technical issues. 8-)

Tony

Edited by: Tony Sutcliffe on Mar 31, 2011 11:10 AM