Installing the Loopback Adaptor

To be able to map a drive over ssh, you need to disable 'File and Printer Sharing' on a network interface. You may not want to do this on your existing interface as you may already have mapped drives and/or shared printers that you still want to use. To overcome this, you need to install a fake interface where you can disable the File and Printer Sharing service and map port 139 (used for drive mapping) over SSH onto this second interface without changing your 'normal' network settings. The following instructions tell you how to install this fake device and what settings to use.

Create this device before trying to map a drive!

  1. Installing the Loopback Adapter:
  2. Open Start, Control Panel, Add Hardware.
  3. Click Next on the introduction dialog box.
  4. Select 'Yes, I have already connected the hardware' and click Next.
  5. Scroll to the bottom of the list of hardware, select 'Add a new hardware device', then click Next.
  6. Select 'Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)', then click Next.
  7. Select 'Network adapters', then click Next.
  8. Select 'Microsoft' as the manufacturer, select 'Microsoft Loopback Adapter' as the adapter, then click Next.
  9. Click Next to confim the installation.
  10. Click Finish to complete the installation.
  1. Configure the newly created adapter:
  2. Open Start, Control Panel, Network Connections.
  3. Select the newly created connection (should be named 'Local Area Connection N', where N is its order number).
  4. Right click on the selected connection and choose Properties from the menu.
  5. Confirm that 'Microsoft Loopback Adapter' (or 'Microsoft Loopback Adapter #N') is displayed in the 'Connect Using:' field. If it isn't, return to step 2 and retry properties for another adapter.
  6. Uncheck (disable) everything except 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)'.
  7. Select 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)', then click Properties to open 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties'.
  8. Select 'Use the following IP address:' and fill in the 'IP address:' and 'Subnet mask:' fields (e.g. 10.0.0.10, 255.255.255.0).
  9. Click Advanced to open 'Advanced TCP/IP Settings'.
  10. Switch to WINS and select 'Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP'.
  11. Click OK to close 'Advanced TCP/IP Settings'.
  12. Click OK to close the 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties'.
  13. Optionally (on XP only) uncheck (disable) 'Notify me when this connection has limited or no conectivity' to remove the connection warning icon from the system notification area.
  14. Click OK to close the connection properties.

If you later want to uninstall the Microsoft Loopback Adapter (once it is not needed any more for the forwarding of a Windows file share), you can uninstall it using Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager.

Vista User information

The 'SSH Driver Letter Mapping' program will work under Vista but you do need to do a little manual work first before trying to run the program. You need to remove a Microsoft patch made in December 2007. Look for update KB942624, uninstall it, reboot and never install it again. This patch stops SMB over port 445, the port required for this program. Maybe one day Microsoft will fix this issue, who knows. In addition to this, you need to allow registry edits. You need to change the permission of the registry key

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MiKTeX.org\MiKTeX\2.5\Core

To give users of the local computer full permission. This is required if you want to allow the 'SSH Driver Letter Mapping' program to add the network mapped drive letter to the Roots path in DAMTP's version of Miktex. If you don't want this to happen, don't worry about changing the registry permissions.