XP and Vista Networking within a Home Network
Many critics of Microsoft products have thru the years have blamed those products with a lack of security, and sometimes rightly so. Microsoft does everything possible to lock down those products and everyone starts complaining this it is now “broken”.
Well, it is not broken but there a couple of issues you need to resolve and configure to make these two systems “talk” to one another. By “talking” to one another, we mean sharing resources across your home network. Resources could be anything from music files, pictures, or even a printer. In this section, show you the new settings within Vista you need to consider and configure. Vista sees two types of networks, Public and Private.
Navigate to the Network and Sharing Center and take a look at the new features. You will see you connection to the internet and whether it is designated as Private or Public. This would have been determined at the time you made you connection to the internet. For the moment, let’s deal with a private network, which is your network at home. You must have a "Private" network in order to share files within your home environment.
Hit "Customize" on the right side of the panel to make any needed changes.
What we want is a "Private Network" with any name you deisre to identify your network.
Choose Private and complete the wizard.
By default, Public File Sharing will de disabled. We have been talking about a Public folder so just where is it located? Go to the C Drive>Users>Public and within there you will see the “Public Folders”.
Among these there are folders for Documents, Music, Pictures, etc. At this point, only users on the local machine have access to this folder as shown in the graphic below:
Special caveat at this point. These instructions will allow access to
the built in Public Folder from within your local network
Hit the drop down arrow on the right side of the panel and you will be presented with three options:
• Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can open files
• Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can open, change, and create files
• Turn off sharing (people logged onto this machine can still access this folder)
Special Note:
Option #1 menas that users from another machine can "Read' files withn the public folder
Option #2 means that users from another network machin can "Read, Change, abd Create" Files within the public folder
Option #3 only allows access to user logged on to the local machine, i.e., no network access.
You could circumvent this by enabling the Guest Account but this is not encouraged.
Open, Create, and Change Files are the same as “Modify” within NTFS permissions. NTFS permissions are an advanced set of permissions used by operating systems since Windows 2000 was introduced. No access means just that. The folder is only available to local users on the Vista machine.
In the graphic below you see a Vista machine named VMVista connected to the internet from within a Private Network. My Workgroup name is named “Wills”. Public File Sharing has been turned on for Network users to “Open, Change, and Create “files. My XP machine (Dell1705) has a Username “John Wills” and so does the Vista machine. I can either “map” a drive to the Public Folder or use “Explorer” to use it.
We can now get to the Public Folder, but what about if you want to create a "special" Shared Folder in which you want to restrict access. This would mean that although a User might have an account on the target Vista machine, you can deny access to this new folder.Go to the C drive and create a new folder named “Test”.
Right click the folder and go to Properties. You will see the Security and Sharing tabs (in version Home Premium and Ultimate). Hit the Sharing tab and you are now presented with a couple of options. Look for a button named Share and hit it and you see the box below:
Continuing with the example, I have created a new user named "Network User" choose “Network User” (a local user on my Vista and XP machine) and select add. Hit the Permission Level and determine the level of access they need. Hit the Share button and complete the process. In this case, “Network User” will be given “Reader” access.
Now hit the "Share" button and you will now see the newly created Shared Folder.
This folder is now accessable from the XP machine on the network by either mapping a Network Drive or using the "Explorer" Method.
Go to My Computer and in the Explorer URL type:
\\vmvista\test or \\vmvista\public
and you will see the folders accessable to you.
**Note**
Subsituite the correct name of your Vista machine for this example to work for you.
The owner of the folder (the user who created it) has by default full access to that folder. Now you can add named users on the network or something unique named “Everyone”. This is basically the same process you went thru in the previous example but now you begin to see how the process works. The “Permissions” that you can give to any user are:
1. Reader (Default)
2. Contributor – this means the user can modify the data
3. Co-Owner – gives the user full access to the entire folder
4. Remove (after action)
Something to note. “Everyone” means EVERYONE. Anyone who gains or has access to your network has access to and file or folder with the Everyone permission. A better plan of action would be to give a specific user the permissions they need otherwise put data that “Everyone” needs access to in the Public folder. Beginning to make sense?
Continuing with the example, I have created a new user named "Network User" choose “Network User” (a local user on my Vista and XP machine) and select add. Hit the Permission Level and determine the level of access they need. Hit the Share button and complete the process. In this case, “Network User” will be given “Reader” access.
At times this can get confusing but the key to remember is properly allocate permissions. My examples were created with a "virtual" Vista machine using VM Ware and the host machine running XPSP2.