Facilitate sharing to enhance network security
A workstation share lets users on your network share directories, files, and printers that reside on a Windows NT workstation. You can use sharing to enhance security on your network by granting users only the permissions to shares that they need to do their job. However, no matter how well you plan your network shares, events don't always run smoothly and complications are inevitable. Although in this article I can't cover every difficulty you might experience with shares, I focus on some common problems that administrators encounter.
One of my users accidentally deleted administrative shares from a workstation. How do I recreate them?
You can recreate the shares in Windows NT 3.5 and later by using the following commands. (In earlier NT versions, deleting administrative shares permanently isn't possible.)
At a command prompt, type
net share admin$
The system will respond with the following output:
Share Name Admin$
Path C:\WINNT
Remark Remote Admin
Max Users No Limit
The command completed successfully.
Now, at the command prompt, type
net share <driveletter>$=<driveletter>:
The system will respond with the following output:
C$ was shared successfully.
Is there a way I can save and restore existing Windows NT shares?
Yes, if you need to restore the shares for one of these three reasons: You've made a clean installation of NT over an existing NT installation, you've moved all data drives from one machine to another, or you've installed NT on a different drive or directory on a machine that already has NT installed.
You can save share names and any permissions that the original NT installation assigned to the shares. Be aware that you can't perform this procedure on a Macintosh volume. To save the share names and their permissions, take the following steps.
- At the NT machine that contains the share names and permissions that you want to save and restore, run the Registry Editor (regedt32.exe).
- Select the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\LanmanServer\Shares Registry key.
- From the Registry menu, click Save Key.
- Save the file to a 3.5" disk with a new filename. You don't need to add an extension; NT will add one for you.
- Reinstall NT on the machine over the existing installation.
- Reboot the machine, then run the Registry Editor.
- Select the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\LanmanServer\Shares key.
- From the Registry menu, click Restore.
- Enter the path and filename of the file you saved in step 4.
- Reboot the server.
Step 9 will override any shares that exist on the new NT installation with the share names and permissions on the file you are restoring from. If you decide that you shouldn't have restored the Shares key after you perform this procedure, you can reverse the process only if you haven't rebooted and logged back in after the restoration. To reverse the process, when you restart the machine for the first time after you've restored the shares, press the spacebar to restore the Last Known Good configuration. Doing so restores the machine to its original configuration. If you press the spacebar and your machine doesn't return to its original condition, you've already rebooted and logged back in, thus overwriting the Last Known Good configuration.
This procedure restores only domain users' permissions; it doesn't restore local users' SIDs. Therefore, you'll lose the local users' permissions you previously created. Network users need to use the Net Shares command to use the shares. After you reboot, you can view all the shares on the machine in Windows Explorer after you create a new share.
When I used the Windows NT 4.0 Server Manager for Domains to recreate an administrative share (i.e., ADMIN$ or C$), I tried to specify permissions on the share. This action seemed to cause a general protection fault error message. Why did this happen?
When you try to specify permissions on an administrative share, you see the error message
services.exe
Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address: 0x77f64bc3
You don't need to set permissions on the administrative shares you recreate. The system sets these permissions, and you can't change them. In fact, in NT 3.51, this problem doesn't exist. If you try to change permissions in NT 3.51, a pop-up window states This has been shared for administrative purposes. The permissions cannot be set. Installing Service Pack 4 (SP4) will correct the problem by making it impossible for you to change permissions for administrative shares as NT 3.51 does.
I've found numerous testdir.tmp files on my shared NTFS volume. What are they, and do I need to delete them?
When a user copies a file or folder to a shared NTFS volume, Windows NT creates a testdir.tmp file. If the user account or group has Full or Delete permissions on the volume, NT deletes the temporary file after the user copies the file or folder. However, if the user doesn't have Delete permissions for the NTFS volume, NT can't delete the temporary file. To resolve this problem, assign users Delete permissions. You can delete old testdir.tmp files, but be careful not to delete any temporary files that might be in use.
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