OT: Sharing folders in Windows 7

Having a Win7 moment – please help.

We have ~10 machines at work connected via a workgroup. On one of the Win7 machines I want to share a folder with the rest of the workgoup. Whenever I try and do this and share it with ‘Everyone’ a ‘locked’ symbol appears in Win Explorer for that directory – the folder is visable for other machines in the workgroup, but they can’t access it, even though the permissions are set as full control to everyone.

I’ve had a quick read about ‘homegroups’, as this it what it REALLY wants to do for me, but don’t see this is the right way to go, given there is an existing office workgroup

What am I missing – it was so easy with XP….. 😉

Do you have firewalls on the each machine ?

Nope – currently all turned off……

You will need to set permisions on the sharing tab and on the security tab of the folder properties.

Was hoping that it was a nice easy one there, not in front of a Win 7 machine at the moment to have a better look-see at how it implements permissions.

You will need to set permisions on the sharing tab and on the security tab of the folder properties

Pretty sure I tried that and it was still locked – will have another look.

What I don’t get is why it’s showing a locked symbol/what it actually means? If I knew what it was locking then it might make things easier to diagnose. Google hasn’t revealed much, other than links tot he Win7 Homegroup sharing walk-through…… though I accept my google poers may be weak on this one…..

You want to try to avoid using ‘special’ folders too; sharing things like Program Files is more trouble than it’s worth. This could be what the padlock is telling you – it means it’s SYSTEM owned or otherwise needs Admin access.

Try sticking the folder you want to share as a subdirectory inside c:\users\public, that should sort out NTFS permissions for you automatically.

Sorry this isn’t particularly accurate, I’m not in front of a W7 machine and the corporate networking I do generally involves Windows XP (and a Server, which sounds like what you actually need).

Oh,

Try adding ‘authenticated users’ to the share.

Cougar – not a system folder. It’s a new folder off the primary drive containing some software documentation – nothing particularly special. A sub dir off of Users sounds like a neat way to go…. the thing that’s bugging me is that I’ve successfully shared another folder before on this system without this hastle…. but can’t remember what was different/I did differently then 😐

Will have another play in a bit – keep the ideas coming…..

Sorted now – Reboot machine, re-share folder with ‘everyone’, check permissions, all good. 30 seconds after the reboot its working as intended using the procedure I thought I should use and have been using all this morning to try and set it up. Random.

Thanks all

My next post will be entitled something along the lines of ‘…Spoofing MAC addresses on Vista for a ligitimate purpose – what am I doing wrong….’ as this is next on my list 😉

Bizzare. Glad you got it sorted.