Secure Networking with Windows
 

Hey guys. I'm thinking about setting up a fileserver here in my lab and am looking for a little bit of help. Unfortunately, I've got a whole boatload of different computers using different installations of Windows (probably 2k through 7) and I'm looking for a way to securely allow a drive on one of those PCs to be a network drive accessible to only specific other users.

I'd rather not go the FTP route since I want this to be something people in the group access regularly. It would host backups of experimental data as well as be a central place for everyone to share papers they've read.

Any advice on a route to take or basic walkthroughs somewhere on the web?

What is the operating system of the computer you are planning on sharing this drive from? Or is that not something firmly established yet?
There are some Linux OS variants which allow one to repurpose a computer into a NAS.
Alternatively, you could probably set up some simple file sharing with a password protected drive/folder.

It will likely be a Win7 computer, as it's currently running our license server for ProEngineer or some program similar to that.

How secure is the simple file sharing stuff? I'd like to be able to limit access to people within a certain IP range or some other method similar to that such that you need your computer to be granted access in order to get into the files.

When you set up a share in Windows, you can specify permissions for that share under the Security tab. First thing to do is remove "Everybody" group from permissions and then just add users who need access to it. Give those users Read and only Read, unless its a dump folder for them. Short of putting in GPOs, this is about as secure as you can get. If there's too many users to manually manage, create a group and stuff them all in there, then add that group to the permissions with whatever permissions they need.

Shade, how would you set up users and such for remote computers? This is a PC that's just going to be running in the back of someone's office, so people won't actually be logging on/off of it.

Also, I remember in the past there being issues with setting up computers to be on the same Workgroup and all that jazz. Do I still need to set everyone to be on the same one of those?

Set up users for remote computers? If you remove the Everybody group, set Public Sharing to off, and turn Password Protected sharing on, the remote computer should ask for a user/pass when the user requests the share, in which the user would enter a user/pass for login. If you're looking to have the computer login based on the individual computer's login credentials, then you're starting to get into policy objects and things get "fun" :P

Workgroup only matters for the whole "computers near you" aspect. When you browse for computers, computers in the same workgroup will be listed immediately. You can still find any computer on any workgroup within your network by browsing the entire network, or manually going to it (\\servername\).

EDIT: I should clarify something real quick. Generally, if you set up a user/pass on the fileserver that matches that of a user's windows login, they can usually just access the share, because Windows file sharing will attempt the user/pass associated with the Windows login first. However, this isn't always the case, as Windows file sharing is a magical beast that only works when it wants to :)

Thanks shade, I'll give it a shot.

Also, that tip about making your Windows Profile and User name the same just fixed the issue I had been having with connecting to my university's network space!

I read your problem which is related with secure networking. When you set up a share in Windows, you can specify permissions for that share under the Security tab. Give those users Read and only Read, unless its a dump folder for them. Short of putting in GPO, this is about as secure as you can get. And you can also done secure networking with windows.