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I have a situation where I am having to work around a medical vendor who has for security reasons limited the connectivity to a system.

The only connection I have available to the system is USB and I need to (somehow) have this USB port connect to a network share of a remote server but appear to the machine as a hard drive / flash drive and work with out installing any drivers or making networking changes on the computer. When the drive is selected it should show the contents of the shared folder etc.

I am unable to modify the medical system in any way but it is a Windows OS running with a skin.

Many thanks!

Ben Ganley
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  • If the machine has no existing network connection to the share and you are not allowed to make network changes (including DHCP or static assigning IP), then this is functionally impossible. If the machine can already see the network share or you would be allowed to modify TCP/IP settings then there is a variety of ways to accomplish what you want (Good news, you probably wouldn't need to even use the usb slot if it already has a network connection). – Naryna Apr 04 '16 at 19:07
  • And that's how you leak medical data. If vendor went through all the troubles of blocking network access, don't go around it. – rvs Apr 04 '16 at 22:00

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Do you really mean the "only" connectivity? eg No wired network or WiFi or anything? If so, then what you describe is impossible. USB and network are totally different. You can get USB to network adapters but they will probably require drivers. If the machine IS locked down, then they will have disabled DHCP by default so you will have no way of configuring the adapter. If they haven't disabled DHCP then you can probably use DHCP to give it an IP address/DNS server etc. and then, assuming you have a network share with files, do the suggestion above. However, that won't in any way appear to be a USB drive. Depending on the application, it may refuse to see a mapped device as a USB disk.

If it is a medical device, I'd prefer it if you tried not to hack it yourself. I imagine the vendors have locked it down for a reason. I for one, would not like to be in hospital with my life depending on a device that had been hacked with advice from serverfault, by people with literally no idea what the device does or is. We could very easily suggest things that may fatally compromise the functionality of the device.

Max Allan
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If you have enough permissions on the systems, it is possible to do something you want using these two commands:

MKLINK /D C:\Share \\Server\Share
SUBST S: C:\Share

It would result into a new drive (S:\), which would open contents of \\Server\Share.

Another option, using USB, can be taking a NTFS formatted USB flash and running the following command on it:

MKLINK /D Share \\Server\Share

Then, when you would see a Share folder inside the USB, and entering that folder would get you to the share.

Tomas Dabasinskas
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