File sharing Windows 2003 Server to Windows 7 clients

[ahsia124]

Here is the scenario. My friend has a small company, they just bought new Windows 7 computers. They have a server running Windows 2003, and they want to set up some file sharing, but restrict access through permissions. There are five drives and they want different people given access to each drive. For some reason, they Windows 7 clients can see the server but they get "System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied." message when specific permissions are granted and they try to add that share. But if "everyone" is granted access, then there are no problems. Can someone help with this problem? I do somewhat understand Windows sharing and NTFS permissions and I have tried various combinations but with no success.

 

[imagoon]

Here is the scenario. My friend has a small company, they just bought new Windows 7 computers. They have a server running Windows 2003, and they want to set up some file sharing, but restrict access through permissions. There are five drives and they want different people given access to each drive. For some reason, they Windows 7 clients can see the server but they get "System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied." message when specific permissions are granted and they try to add that share. But if "everyone" is granted access, then there are no problems. Can someone help with this problem? I do somewhat understand Windows sharing and NTFS permissions and I have tried various combinations but with no success.

Need more information: Domain or workgroup? Domain = likely the permissions on NTFS don't match the share permissions. In a workgroup, you have to create local users and match the passwords to the local machine passwords, after that you need to set NTFS and share permissions appropriately.

Also doing "5 drives to 5 users/groups" is rather poor method to use the disks.

 

[Paperlantern]

I agree with imagoon, with 5 drives for storage there should be some sort of RAID in play here, single drives in a business server is just begging for data loss. A RAID 5 setup or RAID 10 with a hot spare with either partitions, or even better, just folders that map with a login script on the client to a "HOME" drive would be better.

That said, imagoon is right, we need to know what kind of authentication you are using. Domain is epically easier, expandable and more secure with anything over about 5 - 7 machines. Peer to Peer is a LOT harder to manage as the number of machines grows and is much less secure.

 

[ahsia124]

Thanks for the responses. These are the cards that I've been dealt, and my friend brought me in to set this up. I don't think these are 5 physical drives and that's the least of my worries. They are a design firm and current the data is being shared out to everyone in the company. I told them that they need some restrictions in place, if nothing else, just to protect someone from walking out with their data. Their environment will not grow too much and probably max is about 30 people. If it does then they need a more complex solution.

It is a workgroup setup, they don't have a domain there. I have asked them to create matching userids on the Windows 2003 server to their user accounts on the individual Windows 7 clients. The funny thing is when I tried last night, I do get a prompt for a user and password, but I didn't it will if it the client and server credentials matched. So something must be wrong there.

When you say "after that you need to set NTFS and share permissions appropriately"... can you be more specific? The problem right now isn't that the permissions are not restrictive enough, it is the fact that I can even gain access using the user accounts created.

Anyways, appreciate the help and hope there is more coming. Thanks.

 

[Lifted]

I haven't been in a Win 7 and Srv 2003 workgroup scenario, but the problem is likely that you need to specify the server along with the username as Windows will use the logged on computer as the default for credentials when accessing remote shares. So if you are connecting to Server01 and the username is bob, you would use server01\bob as the username. There might be a way around this, but I've never bothered to check. Once you do that, the NTFS permissions you have in place will work.

In a workgroup situation with no need for apps to be running on the server they'd be better of with a NAS for simple file sharing.

 

[imagoon]

To me. the correct answer is time to convert to AD (workgroups are flaky.) However what I mean by the share and NTFS permissions is pretty simple, you need to give people share access (even if it is a group that is simply sharename_access) and then on the file structure assign out permissions from there on the folders.