Allow File and Printer Sharing on all clients?

[Mario Beutler]

Hello,

We have an network with 40 computer. Should I allow "File and Printer
Sharing" on all clients? What is the default settings for Win XP Pro
clients? (Does the firewall blocks "File and Printer Sharing" by
default?)


Thank you for your help,
Mario

 

[Malke]

Hello,

We have an network with 40 computer. Should I allow "File and Printer
Sharing" on all clients? What is the default settings for Win XP Pro
clients? (Does the firewall blocks "File and Printer Sharing" by
default?)

File and Printer Sharing is off by default on all plain vanilla XP
installs. Why ever would you share out the workstations anyway? With 40
workstations, you would normally be saving all data created on
workstations to a server (never locally) and have networked printers.
The workstations should have nothing on them to share.


Malke

 

[Steven L Umbach]

By default it is enabled on XP Pro computers. The Windows Firewall by
default does NOT block access to file and print sharing but you can change
that to allow access only from specific IPs such as admin workstations. If
you are in an Active Directory domain you should leave it enabled and manage
groups, share permissions, password policy, user right for access this
computer from the network, edit Windows Firewall FPS scope, use ipsec, etc,
to manage who can access FPS on your computers. FPS is helpful in a domain
in troubleshooting, inventory, scanning security logs, doing security scans
[MBSA, etc] , managing computers, etc. If your users are NOT local
administrators they can not create shares on their computers. For non domain
networks it is much more difficult to manage all of the above and you want
to disable FPS on all computers that do not need to offer shares or printers
assuming you do not need any the benefits of using FPS such as remote
management via Computer Management - connect to other computer.

Steve

 

[Mario Beutler]

Thank you for your answer!

Mario