Accessing files on LAN from ASP.NET

Question

As it is mentioned in the title. I would like to build a mechanism allowing me to access different files on LAN and read their metadata values. I don't want to change those files, or create new ones. The problem is I would like to have a web interface for doing that, with a database allowing me to store data about those files for comparison.

1) Is it possible?

2) If it is, where should I start my research?

Answer 1

1) it is possible, you will have to tackle different security challenges, like impersonation when accessing UNC shares

2) I would suggest to think about the overall design, if this is really what you need instead of having for example agents locally, on each machine, which would access the files locally, on each machine and would provide certain service based functionality to repot file metadata, do the comparison etc