Windows XP SP2
Let's start with the grand daddy of the bunch.
While it's not necessary, it's helpful if all the computers on the network are in the one workgroup. Go to Start > Control Panel > System, and navigate to the Computer Name tab. Click the Change... button. In the computer name field, to keep things easy, we're going to call it XP. In the workgroup field, enter an appropriate name. We're going to go with just the simple Network. Click OK, and a message will appear welcoming you to the new group. Click OK, and then Yes to restart.
Setting the Computer name and Workgroup.
Once back into Windows, we'll continue with our configuring. An interesting situation — Windows XP doesn't like sharing if you've set a blank Administrator password (or indeed, if your own user password is left blank). Regardless of which account you're using, if you've left the password empty you'll want to set one by going to Start > Control Panel > User Accounts. Click on the appropriate account, select Create a Password and follow the prompts.
Of course there is a way to bypass the password requirement, but it's not exactly a good idea to do so!
If you plan to log into your XP machine's file shares, you'll need to set a password for your accounts.
At this point we could potentially use Simple File Sharing and make things quick and easy, however it's certainly not the most flexible or secure of methods — so let's do things properly.
Turning off Administrative Shares
Next we're going to turn off Administrative shares; these are secret shares created when you first install XP, and while they can be useful, they can also be a risk. While you shouldn't be handing out administrative passwords to people, if they are given out and the user knows about administrative shares, they can happily browse your hard drive unimpeded. If you're running Windows XP Home, these don't exist and you can go to the next step.
Open up Windows Explorer (usually found in Start > Programs > Accessories), then right click on your hard drive and select Sharing and security. If you selected the C: drive, you'll notice the Share name is set to C$ — the dollar sign at the end means that it's invisible when browsing the network from other computers — however, it can still be accessed manually through Windows Explorer. Since it's the default name included with all XP Professional installations, it's a risk, so we want to turn it off. But if we turn it off here, it'll be recreated the next time we reboot, so we'll need to be a little more clever.
Administrative shares are hidden and make the whole hard drive available to administrators remotely — you might want to disable them.
Hit the Start button, then select Run, and type regedit in the field. Hit the Enter key, and the Registry Editor will load.
Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder in the tree view on the left, and then under that browse to SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters.
In the viewpane of the right-hand side, right click where there is no text, select New > DWORD Value, and type AutoShareWrks and hit the Enter key. It's by default set to 0, which means it's off.
Note that if you're running a server version of XP, the key name will need to be changed to AutoShareServer instead. Close down the Registry Editor, and restart your machine.
Killing Administrative shares for good.
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canberra_photographer
07/06/2008 06:02 PM
Difficult? File sharing in my experience has proven surprisingly easy with Mac OS and XP. You know how I got an XP SP2 and Mac OS 10.5.3 machine to network? I connected them to my network, enabled file sharing on both using the right click menu and... no, that's it. They worked fine. Didn't have to adjust firewalls or anything.
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Kubbin
10/06/2008 10:52 PM
Thank you...just the info I needed
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mohammed
15/09/2008 09:52 PM
Save your network passwords for xp
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