password protecting shares with WinXP

[canooten]

I'm in the process of replacing the PC's on my companies network. Until now, most of the machines were Win98, with a few 2000's thrown in.
On the old systems, the C drives were shared on the network, but when you attmepted to access them via the network, you were prompted for a login.

So far, on the XP machines, it allows unfettered access to the shares....no password needed. How do I set up these machines with shared drives (for administrative purposes) that will prompt for an admin login when accessed from the network? The machines are running limited user accounts, but of course have administrator accounts as well.

 

[office politics]

automatically xp creates hidden shares for admins. these shares are the root of your hard drives (im not sure if cdroms or removable drives are included). You'll need to enter an admin username & password for the share if you're not logged in locally on the client as that user.

to access these shares browse to \\computername\c$

where c is the drive letter

 

[canooten]

OK, I see how this works, but what username and password is used? Any Adminstrator login? Does this have to enabled, or is it available by default (the login)

 

[office politics]

its enabled by default when file & print sharing is enabled on 2k and higher clients or servers. these are called the administrative shares and can only be accessed by admin accounts.

 

[canooten]

OK, this is what I'm looking for. Not sure why, but when I tried logging into a default share on a system yesterday, it wouldn't take my admin login, but today it's working fine.

One other question along the same lines. I'm putting partitions on these new systems (which will be running limited accounts) and I'd like to be able to map these partitions and allow access to the files on those partitions over the network (audio/video files for sales staff use). But when I try to map the partition it's asking for an admin login to access the share.

Is there a way to map these partitions on a system running a limited user account and not have to log in each time the mapped drive is accessed?

 

[brady]

You won't have to login everytime if you have them mapped out with an admin account. Once you set the drive as a mapping it should hold in your settings.

 

[canooten]

But doesn't it only hold the settings until the computer that has mapped the drive is restarted? After that the admin info has to be re-entered, or is there a way to save it permanantly?

 

[brady]

It should save in your local profile as soon as you map the drive... If you check the automatically "re-connect" feature while mapping the drive, you should be fine.

 

[canooten]

Great. I'll give that a try and see what I get.

 

[brady]

Good luck to ya