Home Networking and Administrator Rights - Surely It's Not This Ha

[Geordietx]

Greetings - I have posted this on a couple of other outside forums and I only
got one vague response to try "remote access" - but that's not really what
I'm looking for as a solution, I don't think. Please allow me to explain my
setup and the issue. I have a home network with three PC's. Two of the PC's
are wired and in the same room - myself and my partners. The other is my
prior PC - a perfectly fine P4 - which I've moved to the living room and now
use my HDTV as a monitor. That PC is wireless and acts more as a server.
Let's call the wireless PC in the living room - at the other end of the house
- MIKEOLDPC (since, oddly enough, that's it's name...) The new, wired PC
that I built we'll call MIKENEWPC. It's important to note that MIKEOLDPC
runs XP Home and MIKENEWPC runs XP Pro - because of the limitations I believe
this poses in this particular configuration. The setup has been great and
very useful with one major exception - I need to make the network and the
PC's understand that I am the boss of both MIKEOLDPC and MIKENEWPC (but not
necessarily the third PC). For all practical purposes, I would like for the
security to be wide open between the two with little or no limitation. Is
this possible? I have spent MANY hours trying to set permissions and trying
security consoles, templates, and other things I've downloaded trying to get
this to work. The main thing is to be able to sit at MIKENEWPC and access
and control MIKEOLDPC without having to get up and run to the other end of
the house every few minutes because "ACCESS DENIED - YOU MAY NOT HAVE
SUFFICIENT RIGHTS TO ACCESS THIS <<FILE, DRIVE, FOLDER, ETC...>>. Not only
can I not seem to gain the rights, often when I do get them I find that
Windows has reverted some or all of them for no good reason - usually when I
haven't been on the network for a relatively long period of time - at least,
that's how it seems to me. Does anybody have any ideas? Surely I'm not the
first person to have this issue - or maybe I am, might be something quite
simple that just hasn't come to me, LOL. I was impressed with the knowledge
I've seen looking through these forums and hope someone can offer some
suggestions before I toss MIKEOLDPC right out the proverbial window! Thanks
- sorry for the long-windedness, it's a trademark, just ask anybody who knows
me,

 

[Shark]

Networking computers is meant to share resources on each other.
Specifically, what resources do you want to access on MIKEOLDPC from
MIKENEWPC (or vice-versa)? And what difficulty are you having with
that?

If it's files, then manually specifying which folders you want to
share should do it. Be aware that in XP Home, as I understand it, it
was not meant to disable "Simple File Sharing" so customizing folder
access would have a lot of limitations. I believe it's possible to
disable SFS in Home but it's not straightforward. Either way, COMPLETE
and FULL access to every folder (as I believe you want it) on either
computer is not sensible from a security standpoint. This could be
accomplished by sharing the root of your HD, but I strongly advise you
not to do it, and specially on your system HD.

But I have a feeling you want more than files... What you want (at
least what I think it is) is NOT very typical. "I am God of these
computers and my powers are infinite". That really goes beyond the
concept of SHARING. But it can be achieved with additional software.
Look into something like PCanywhere or some other equivalent tool.
These softwares allow you to remotely control a computer and do pretty
much anything.

 

[Geordietx]

Appreciate the response, shark. I don't THINK I have a God complex - and
actually, the desire to control MIKEOLDPC was stemming more from laziness
than anything else. I had wiped MIKEOLDPC clean and reinstalled from an OEM
restore disk - not only did I get AOL, but also Compuserve and several other
software 'goodies' that are now (mostly, thankfully) extinct. I wanted to
sit at my nice comfortable desk in front of my nice new PC to do all the
deleting of old software and adding of new that had to happen. I was
consistently - and I do mean consistently - blocked most of the time -
besides being admin on both machines, setting any group policy that I thought
would help, AND sharing the root of EVERY hard drive on both machines, I
still couldn't do what I wanted to do. It still seems strange to me that
there isn't some way to completely break that down other than buying
something like PC Anywhere - which retails for about $200. But I hear you
saying that this is the case. It became more of a mission to me at some
point - convinced that I was just doing something wrong or missing something
entirely. I feel better now and I have chipped away at it until I've got it
somewhat where I want it. It was a lot of work, though - but a great
learning experience. Thanks again.

 

[Shark]

I didn't mean you had a God-like complex literally, hehe. It was more
the desire to do anything and everything (which I repeat, is NOT
sharing/networking). Indeed remote configuration goes much beyond
administrator access.

I forgot to mention Windows offers remote desktop natively so you
could save yourself some cash and use it's built-in capability
instead. Albeit there is a caveat. Remote desktop has to be manually
allowed on the receiving computer so you would have to get up from
your chair at the beginning of the session. Since your going to be
doing this for a limited period only until your PC is setup it sounds
like a small price to pay. I've never used Windows remote desktop but
it shouldn't be hard.