Specific network sharing

T

TheFire

Geek Trainee
I am trying to network a group of 10 computers where there is a main "server" computer that can see all the contents of the hard drives on the other computers and the other computers can only see the "shared documents" folder of every computer. All of the computers have either XP or XP Pro. I tried something I was recommended by adding an identical user and password to each computer. Then I used a command prompt from the "server" to type the following for each computer:

net use p: \\PC1\c$ /y

I change PC1 to the actual computer name, but I get the message that it is not found. Do I need to add more to the command line? Is there another way to do this?
 
It's an office network. I think I found a way that will work for now. I just shared the hard drive on each computer and gave the share a unique name like Admin3ep8r$. Then I mapped to those locations from the "server." It's not totally hack proof, but in order for someone to see the hard drive contents of each computer, they would have to know each individual share name.

But now I have a different problem. I can see the hard drives on the computers, but certain folders aren't available to see, like Windows, Program Files, and My Documents. What's the deal?
 
OK, now I have one computer that can be seen on the network, but it's shared folders aren't seen. The firewall is set to allow file and printer sharing. If I click on the computer in network places, it prompts for a guest account password. The guest account is active but not enabled and does not have a password. The security and sharing permissions are set for everyone and guests to have full access.
 
FYI, "hidden" Windows shares aren't hidden for security purposes; they're hidden for organizational reasons. In other words, in a situation where a server had a lot of unique user shares, users don't need to see all of the other users on the network's private shares, they only need to see their own. Hence, one would make the user accounts hidden shares and map them all as links or drives on the client systems. If you tried to use hidden shares as a security measure, I think you'd find it'd only protect against casual users and not even the most uneducated of attacker; it is trivial to index a Windows system's hidden shares.

If you'd like my advice, I freely give it. It seems to me that your setup may be more complicated than it needs to be, and could be prone to a lot of problems and administrative overhead. Otherwise, it will work. But if I were to find myself in your position, I would without a second thought setup a single, centralized server with a RAID array which would hold all of the shared files and profiles for your users. This system would also be responsible for handling user privileges, directory services (think shared address book), authentication and group profiles. You can certainly do this with a Windows server, but personaly I favor Linux for important server functions, especially if budget is a factor since it costs nothing for neither the OS nor the client licenses. You could actually use SME Server, a free operating system based on Linux which is easy to setup and manage, performs extremely well, is very secure, and has almost no administrative overhead. It also has a lot of cool features like secure mail (POP, SMTP, IMAP, webmail), LDAP (directory services), Windows domain authentication, Appletalk compatibility, VPN tunneling, and a lot more. It can even act as the firewall for your network if needs be. Whether you used the extra features or not would of course be up to you, but the Windows file & print sharing capability is excellent, and actually performs substantially better than an actual Windows server in the same role. Perhaps the best part is that the client systems cannot tell the difference between a Windows server and a Linux server acting as a Windows server, so to your users it is totally transparent.

Hope this has been helpful...
 
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