Sharing Woes

I am having no luck with sharing with Win 7 computers.

How can I meet these conditions:

1. All files are available to anyone connected on my router, which has password

2. All public networks are disallowed access to files regardless of 'Everyone' permission being set.

My solution: Set password protected sharing for the public networks in the advanced sharing. Yet I have come to realize what I save for the home/work dropdown will change the public networks dropdown settings!!! wtf...

My alternate solution: When I try to make "identical accounts" as Windows help says (I take this to mean the computer I am accessing has the exact same user account name on it to login to) and used passworded file sharing for both home/work and public networks, I don't even get the opportunity to login. Despite giving credentials to the user on the share/security tab, I just get a "you do not have access contact administrator blahblah..."

Hello and welcome to the forums, lakecityransom,

The solution is rather simple,

If you do not want other devices/PCs to access your files when you're in a Public Network go to the advanced sharing box once again, and turn off network discovery and turn off file and printer sharing. Those two options can be set seperately for each type of network and will not overwrite the others...

The password protected sharing option is the only one that applies to all types of Networks (Home/Business/Public) indiscriminately.

For example, this screenshot shows that I've forbidden external access to my files by disabling file and printer sharing when in a Public Network



While at the same time allowing others to see my files and shares on my home, password protected router...



Hope that helps!

Hmm... it is interesting that Windows will not honor the settings that you've put for it...

In the meantime, can try to disable the 2 Homegroup Service(s) (HomeGroup Listener and HomeGroup Provider) for the computer sharing the files and folders and try again?

Start|Services.msc|HomeGroup Listener|right click|properties|stop|disable|repeat for HomeGroup Provider

(We're forcing the PCs to use Workgroup sharing instead)

Be right back, with more help...

If you want to share files across a network, it MUST be a 'private' network - Public networks are such as those in Starbucks.

Set your Windows 7 to accept your home router network as being Home Network.
Put any files you want to share across the network in your Public folder, and everything should just work.

This is basic from Microsoft but might help.
Video: Sharing files with HomeGroup - Help & How-to - Microsoft Windows

NoelDP said:

If you want to share files across a network, it MUST be a 'private' network - Public networks are such as those in Starbucks.

Set your Windows 7 to accept your home router network as being Home Network.
Put any files you want to share across the network in your Public folder, and everything should just work.

I know the difference, I am simply testing to see if people could still steal my files by trying to access shared machine from laptop while it is in 'public' mode.

It doesn't matter what I configure it as, the rules remain the same. Its open house to anyone and everyone if its set to home/work or public. When I change it I've even tried resetting the connecting and restarting the computer. It still doesn't make the rules reflected in advanced sharing take hold.

I really do not want to use the 'public' folders like music, videos, etc. I want to use direct sharing of certain folders and perhaps entire hard drives.

I feel like this has something to do with me using the 'Everybody' permission. If I turn it on, everyone can access files. If I turn it off, nobody can access files (regardless of network mode).

I've managed to figure this out utilizing the homegroup. The drawback: Home users cannot access your files unless they are capable of joining your homegroup (think special LAN devices here). If anyone happens upon this subject here is what I did:

Make sure you have a homegroup setup. After you activate it, you can change the password from the 'HomeGroup' link. If you want to do this do it now. Make sure the network type is still set to home and join any computers you want to share with.

Here was my advanced sharing buttons as follows:
home dropdown - on, on, off (public file sharing turns on for public networks otherwise), off, 128-bit, on
public dropdown - off, off, off, off, 128-bit, on

To Share:
Right click and properties on what you want to share; Advanced, permissions, type homeusers and hit enter to add. You need to delete 'everyone' as a share. You also need to delete it from the security tab permissions. When you share a file/folder this permission is added automatically.

Warning: Deleting the homegroup and making a new one or changing the password messed up sharing for me. You will know, because the permission on a shared folder no longer says homegroup, but instead gets stuck with a {x-x-x-xxxx....} key that does not turn into decode into the homeusers permission text in a couple seconds. If this happens delete that key and type in homeusers again on your shared folders.

Once the user has joined the homegroup, they will have permission to access files regardless of if it is set to a public network or not. This is where I got confused. I checked with other computers to make sure they did not have access.

If you put a device on homegroup and still get access denied, try logging out of the device. Sometimes it gets stuck for reasons beyond my knowing.

Note 1: If you cannot access subdirs of your shared folder, check the security tab for homeuser permissions. It must reflect the exact same permissions you put into your share tab. You might want to delete other spammy accounts like {x-x-x-xxxx....}. This is just a list of anything that ever got into that file/folder.

Note 2: Regarding the user folder getting auto-shared: http://susan-ng.hubpages.com/hub/Win...e-users-folder