Workgroups question

[WAW]

Hi, y'all,
I have blithely been under the assumption that only computers in the same
workgroups can share resources. I recently attached a client's computer to
our network in order to gain Internet access and download some needed
software. I found that when I went to My Network Places that the client's
computer could "see" all the shared folders on our companies network! Have
I been wrong all this time or is something else amiss?
TIA,

 

[Ron Lowe]

Hi, y'all,
I have blithely been under the assumption that only computers in the same
workgroups can share resources. I recently attached a client's computer
to our network in order to gain Internet access and download some needed
software. I found that when I went to My Network Places that the client's
computer could "see" all the shared folders on our companies network!
Have I been wrong all this time or is something else amiss?
TIA,

You've been wrong all this time ;-)

A workgroup is just a logical grouping of machines to break up the browse
list into more manageable chunks. It does not, and never has, provided any
form of security between the workgroups.

Traditionally, within the network browser window, you would see a list of
machines in your own workgroup. But you could always go up a level to
'Entire Network' and see a list of all the workgroups on the LAN. You
could then browse down into those too.

If you ignore browsing, then the whole concept of workgroups rather
dissapears. You can always net view \\some-pc and see it's resources, even
though the machine may be in another workgroup. The workgroup name is not
used to specify the path to the machine.

That has always been the case.

Now with XP, the default view is to show shared resources, rather than
machines, in the Network Places window. This is populated by something
called the Net Crawler, which is where the XP machine interrogates each
machine in turn for a list of shares, and plonks them here for your perusal.
( You can turn off Net Crawling. ) That's what you are seeing in
operation.

 

[Chuck]

Hi, y'all,
I have blithely been under the assumption that only computers in the same
workgroups can share resources. I recently attached a client's computer to
our network in order to gain Internet access and download some needed
software. I found that when I went to My Network Places that the client's
computer could "see" all the shared folders on our companies network! Have
I been wrong all this time or is something else amiss?
TIA,

Your current understanding is correct. Workgroup membership has no relation to
what you can or cannot access - it just makes it possible to create a list of
the resources that you're most likely to access.

Access permissions are controlled by authentication and authorisation. If
correctly authorised, you can access any resource in Entire Network, not just
the workgroup resources displayed directly under My Network Places.