UNC Paths as Links

Question

Howdy everyone:

Believe me, I've searched high and low for an answer to how I can simply add a UNC path to my Intranet page in Confluence.  None of the articles referencing anything about file:/// and all that business DO NOT work.  When you attempt that method, Confluence says "Please enter a valid URL"

Seems awfully basic functionality to allow UNC paths, especially when my users are logging in via SAML.

Does anyone have a true fix?

Thanks for any help you may have.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Um.  You do know that that article is just a longer (and much better detailed and expansive) version of what I wrote?

Blake Duffey_ghqdtv · Answer

This is a poor response.  A UNC is quite fixed in an environment using something like DFS.  The namespace root \domain.com\foo is distributed to the company - and that content can be hosted on a single or multiple shared folders across single/multiple hosts.

DFS Namespaces overview | Microsoft Learn

For a user where Confluence is an intranet-only solution, wanting to leverage UNCs is a pretty expected behavior.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The "fix" is to understand what a UNC is.  It is not a URL, and it's not "static" - it depends on how your networks are set up.  In the most simple case for a UNC that will vary: /home/nic/bob.txt is not going to land on my bob.txt on your machine. And, of course, the server's UNC reading will be different (because it probably doesn't have /home/nic)

Try swapping to URLs, these define how to reach a resource and exactly where it is.