CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.5. Sharing File System Resources

In this section, I discuss how to set up the Windows OS for sharing network resources. I begin with a discussion of some of the core options that must be set to network within a Windows OS.

Every Windows computer must have a computer name to participate in a Windows network, and each computer name must be unique on the network to properly address a specific computer. To review the steps to change your computer's name, take a look at the section, "Changing the computer name in Windows", earlier in the chapter.

3.5.1. User-level access control

Current versions of Windows operating systems use a type of access control known as user level access control. User-level access control means that when you share a resource out onto the network, you actually assign permissions to particular users. If someone wants access to the share, his or her user account has to have been given permissions to the share, and the user must log in with that particular account.

Windows OSes today always use user-level access control while older versions of Windows, such as Windows 9x, supported share-level access control as well. Share level access allowed you to put a password on the share and not based your security on a list of permissions assigned to users. There is not an option to switch to share-level access control in today's versions of Windows. This means that when ...