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By Root 1535 0

’t NTFS have all those wild permissions such as Read, Execute, Take Ownership, and all that? Yes, it does, but NTFS permissions and network permissions are totally separate beasties. Microsoft wanted Windows to support many different file systems (NTFS, FAT16, FAT32), old and new. Network permissions are Microsoft’s way of enabling you to administer file sharing on any type of partition supported by Windows, no matter how ancient. Sure, your options will be pretty limited if you are working with an older file system, but you can do it.

The beauty of Windows is that it provides another tool—NTFS permissions—that can do much more. NTFS is where the power lies, but power always comes with a price: You have to configure two separate sets of permissions. If you are sharing a folder on an NTFS drive, as you normally are these days, you must set both the network permissions and the NTFS permissions to let others access your shared resources. Some good news: This is actually no big deal! Just set the network permissions to give everyone full control, and then use the NTFS permissions to exercise more precise control over who accesses the shared resources and how they access them. Open the Security tab to set the NTFS permissions.

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NOTE Windows offers two types of sharing: share-level and NTFS permissions.

Accessing Shared Drives/Directories

Once you have set up a drive or directory to be shared, the final step is to access that shared drive or directory from another machine. Windows 2000 and XP use My Network Places and Windows Vista and Windows 7 use Network, although you’ll need to do a little clicking to get to the shared resources (Figure 23-40).

You can also map network resources to a local resource name. For example, the FREDC share can be mapped to be a local hard drive such as E: or F:. From within any Explorer window (such as My Documents or Documents), choose Tools | Map Network Drive to open the Map Network Drive dialog box (Figure 23-41). In Windows Vista/7, you’ll need to press the ALT key once to see the menu bar. Click the Browse button to check out the neighborhood and find a shared drive (Figure 23-42).

In Windows 2000, you can also use the handy Add Network Place icon in My Network Places to add network locations you frequently access without using up drive letters. Windows XP removed the icon, but added the menu option in its context bar on the left; Windows Vista and Windows 7 have removed it altogether. Here’s how it looks on a Windows 2000 system (Figure 23-43).

Mapping shared network drives is a common practice, as it makes a remote network share look like just another drive on the local system. The only downside to drive mapping stems from the fact that users tend to forget they are on a network. A classic example is the user who always accesses a particular folder or file on the network and then suddenly gets a “file not found” error when the workstation is disconnected from the network. Instead of recognizing this as a network error, the user often imagines the problem is a missing or corrupted file.

Figure 23-40 Shared resources in Network

Figure 23-41 Map Network Drive dialog box in Vista

Figure 23-42 Browsing for shared folders

Figure 23-43 Add Network Place icon in Windows 2000

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TIP All shared resources should show up in My Network Places (or Network in Vista/7). If a shared resource fails to show up, make sure you check the basics first: Is File and Printer Sharing activated? Is the device shared? Don’t let silly errors fool you!

UNC

All computers that share must have a network name, and all of the resources they share must also have network names. Any resource on a network can be described by combining the names of the resource being shared and the system sharing. If a machine called SERVER1 is sharing its C: drive as FREDC, for example, the complete name would look like this:

\\SERVER1\FREDC

This is called the universal naming convention (UNC). The UNC is distinguished by its use of double backslashes in front of the sharing system’s name