another life blog

In our household, we’ve always had multiple computers and a small network going. So compared to your average Joe, I believe I know a bit more about setting up a network share. However, when it comes to sharing a folder through network, I’ve always depended on a bit of luck whenever the logins for all computers involved aren’t the same. When the problem arises, I would depend on accessing the system shares of “\\NetComp\C$” which gave me full control of the networked HDD. Usually, it’d prompt me for an username and password - and that’d be the end of it. However, I’m not very happy to do this when someone visits and wants something off my computer because s/he could suck everything off my hdd including my personal data! Besides, it’s hardly secure if I had to give out my username and login every time.

So every since Windows 98, I’ve been operating under the assumption that there’s something really crazy that I need to learn in order to make a folder shared … and I never bothered to look deeply into it. … Well, no, I did look deeply into it and never discovered how! But a month or two ago, as I was messing around with sharing the printer in my apartment to Ricky and Mo - I finally discovered an article that gave me the answer to my headache over all these years. It’s like I discovered the holy grail in Windows Networking ~ wow! Power UP!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727037.aspx

Password Protected Sharing

With password protected sharing enabled, other computers on your network will not be able to access your shared folders, including the Public folder, without a user name or password that corresponds to a user account on the computer with the shared folder. When a user on another computer tries to connect to the shared folder, they will send the user name and password of the account that they used to log on to their own computer. For example, if they logged on to their computer with the “Bob” account and a password, then the “Bob” name with its password is sent when connecting to a shared folder on another computer.

If there is a “Bob” account with its password on the computer that is sharing the folder, the shared folder connection will be successful (provided the “Bob” account is specified as one of the accounts that can access the share). However, if there is no “Bob” account on the computer that is sharing the folder, the shared folder connection will fail and the user on the other computer will be prompted with a dialog box to type in a user name and password. At this point, the user on the computer attempting to connect can type the name and password of an account on the computer sharing the folder that is specified as one of the accounts that can access the share.

To prevent shared folder connection failures, you can do one of the following:

Add the same accounts and passwords to all of the computers on your network

For example, if you have three computers in your home and four family members that use them, add all four accounts with their passwords corresponding to your family members to all three computers. When this is done, each family member can access the shared folders of the other computers, regardless of which computer they are using. This is the recommended method, which provides protection of shared folders and prevents shared folder connection failures.

When you disable password protected sharing, the computer sharing the folder does not require a user account or password. Anyone on your network can access the shared folders of the computer (provided the folder was shared for the Guest or Everyone account). This behavior is equivalent to simple file sharing in Windows XP.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:43 am and is filed under Funny/Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.