Hey guys, I'm relatively new here, but I'm sure someone can help me out, so I'll give you the scenario that I'm facing with my network and hopefully you can provide me with some aid.

At the moment I have a small home network running through my wireless router. The router provides all computers connected to it with an internet connection, and I've also created a small file and printer sharing network between my desktop, my laptop, my mother's desktop and my brother's laptop. All computers are running Windows XP other than my laptop which is running Vista.

Currently, all the computers can connect to each other, and a few files are being shared on the network. To share files and folders at the moment I simply right click the one in question and enable sharing. For some I have only set read permission so that my brother can't go and edit my music collection and things like that.

Though what I want to do now, is be able to share a folder (which will probably end up being an entire drive) between my Laptop and my Desktop, but I don't want my brother's laptop, or my Mum's, to be able to have read or write access to these files.

I think I am close to understanding it, I right click on a file or folder, click Sharing and Security, then I click "Share this folder", and it shares, but when I click the permissions button, which brings up the "Share Permissions" dialog, and under "Group or user names:" it has only "Everybody" that I can set permissions for. I then click "Add" but when I type my laptop's computer's name (CAMERON-LAPTOP) it says it can't be found. I try changing the "Location" but the only one there is my desktop's name.

So essentially, if anyone here has any idea how I can set sharing permissions for files with XP so that I can add a single node to have read and write permissions, it'd be great if you could help me.

Thanks.

That's because you are not on a domain or have a domain controller to authenticate users. You have a peer to peer. So in the scenario that you presented, if you HAD a domain controller when you clicked share and security, then permissions, then Add you would see all authenticated users on your domain , the domain controller or DC is responsible for this. So now you are asking , well how do I get to see all the users on my peer to peer when I click Add. What you have to do is for each user you want to be able to assign permissions and rights to on your w/s you have to add there logon account to your pc , since you do not have a DC to present credentials for users. So for instance if you had a brother Jack and his PW was ghostrider, on your pc you will have to add his account jack using his PW ghostrider, then when you click add you will see his account. Not only do you have to configure permissions you also have to configure the security settings. As you soon will be aware a peer to peer can be quite combersome when you get up to 10 or more PCs. If you had 10 pc's and you wanted all the users to be able to acces all the 10 w/s you would end up entering 10 accounts on each machine, so 10 x 10 = 100 , so you would be there for quite a while.

Typically, on a home workgroup, the access between PC's is limited by Guest Account permissions. As such, the easiest way to see stuff on the other computers is to use the Shared Folders (in XP) and the Public Folders (in Vista).

You can "bypass" this in most cases by using account mirroring. That is using identical accounts (not renamed accounts) with identical passwords on all the systems in the network.

if you do not have your log on account on the pc that has the share ( shared folder ) you are accessing from across the network you will be prompted to enter credentials of someone on that pc you are trying to access. The public folder , yes that too, though LOL you have to move everything to that filder. I could never get shares to work right by having the same log on name on all the PCs and I do not think MS recommends that .