On 20 Oct 2002, at 0:02, JMB wrote:

> Well, my company's IT department is useless so I ask for help from the
> experts. I have a company provided laptop with Win2k Professional on it.
> During bootup I have to 'login' with my user name and password. I also
> have a desktop at home with Win98SE on it. I decided to lan the two
> together with a crossover ethernet cable so that I could transfer files
> easily back and forth and let the laptop share my scanner and printer
> without a lot of fuss. First I enabled the sharing feature on both
> computers drives, etc. After bootup, my desktop can 'see' the laptop's C
> drive and the laptop can see the desktop's drives. The laptop can access
> the contents of the desktop's drives but not vice versa. The desktop
> give me an error message that I need to enter a password to access the
> laptop's C drive. I have tried everything that I can think of, but
> nothing works.

> Is there some place on the laptop that I need to establish a lan user and
> password to let the desktop access the laptop?

  Exactly.  NT/2K/XP do (only) "user-level" protection; 9x/ME, since they
can be run without user logins, offer an alternative "share-level" access
control where there is (can be) a password for each resource.

  Since the 2K laptop doesn't "speak" share-level access control, you need
to select user-level access control on the 98 box -- which may only be
possible if you start using at least one user login on the 98 box.  (Tweakui
offers an auto-login feature so you can use this but ignore it....)

  You can avoid the prompt completely if you have an account and password
set on the 98 box that match your account on the 2K box.

> Or is there someplace on the laptop to find out what the access code is?

> (The company did give me the administrator's password for the laptop -
> perhaps I need to use that to log in?

  You should not need this to solve your problem.

> But I am confused because my own
> desktop only has a Microsoft Network Access username and password.
> Perhaps that has to be the same as the Win2K system?

  As indicated above:  If they are the same, and the 98 box is applying user-
level access control, then when the 2K box tries to access the share, it
will silently supply these to the 98 box and access will be granted.

> I tried to find archievs of this on the no-spin site but I even got lost
> there. Oh well, maybe I'm just a lost cause anyway.  Any help would be
> better than what my IT dept. told me. (They said hook up the cable between
> the two computers and it 'should' work!!)


  As an IT professional, specifically involved in network security, I would
not be totally happy with the idea of you directly interconnecting a machine
that is, from the point of view of the work network, trusted, to a machine
that is not.  Nor with putting your work account/password credentials on an
untrusted machine.  Nor, for that matter, with giving an ordinary user (you)
an administrator password -- 2K goes to great lengths to eliminate the cases
that often made that necessary with NT.

  (Don't get me started about the fact that most IT departments are staffed
by folks who don't really want to do user-support, and so aren't motivated
to become good at it.  That would be off-topic for the list.)

David Gillett

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