Weyland.be

I’ve been reading a lot about people who are having troubles accessing their shares folders in a Windows network. Although there are about a gazillion ways to solve that, this is the one with the least hassle, and the upmost userfriendlyness (oh, ok, and the least secure too :p )

There is a way to allow access to your windows shares without users accessing them being asked for a login or password. These are the three steps to follow on the machine on which you want to access shares.

1. Open up your guest account – Go to your local user and groups manager (start > run > lusrmgr.msc) and into the users. Double click the guest account and de-select the “account is disabled” option. Now close the windows.
2. Open up network shares to guest account – Go to your local security settings (start > run > secpol.msc) and browse through the tree to here: Security Settings > Local Policies > User Right Assignments. Search for the “Deny access to this computer from the network” policy, double click it, and remove the “guests” group from this policy.
3. Check NTFS and share security – Make sure that the guest group can at least read from your shares. Add the guest group or make sure that everyone group has the right privileges.

All set! Your machine should be popping up in your network places, and you should have access without even being asked for a login or password.

There is a little remark though. I already said that this is probably the least secure solution, and that is because of step 1 … opening up the guest account – a simple way to make your machine a little more secure is just to disable the guest account again.