How to share a drive and make it show up under "network"

[Kroze]

I'm just wondering if it's possible to get a drive to show up under "Network" and is accessible to anyone in the household without manually going to each computer and mapping a share drive. I just wanted the ease of having the drive show up automatically without any password or log in required.

If they're on the same network, the drive should automatically shows up and be available.

 

[JackMDS]

Enable the Guest account on each computer.

Tune Permission and Security to allow Total control by Guests and everyone.

Please Note that this metohd open evry thing to evryone. However, you can still restricted specific Computer/Drive/Folder to by specificaly tuning their Permission/Security.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Turn-the-guest-account-on-or-off

In general.

Permission and Security issues with Vista/Win7, check the following settings.
All users that are allowed to share need to have account on all the computers that they are allowed to connect to.

Everyone is an account, it means a group of all of the users that already have an account and been established as users.
Using the Everyone feature saves the need of configuring permission to each of the established users, it does not mean Everyone that feel that they would like to login.

Users that do not have an account on the computer are Not part of the Everyone Group.


If security on the LAN is Not needed and users are Not established, then switching On the Guest account provides semi-open configuration.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Turn-the-guest-account-on-or-off

---------------------
Point to the a Folder that meant to to be share. Right click and choose properties.
In the properties
Click on the Security tab shown in the pic bellow to the right) and check that the users and their permission (shown in the pic bellow center and left) are correctly configured. Then do the same to the Permission tab.
This screen shot is from Win 7, Vista's menus are similar.

http://www.ezlan.net/Win7/Permission-Security.jpg

In both the Security panel, and the Permission panel you have to highlight each User/Group and examine that the Permission Controls are checked correctly.
When everything is OK, Reboot the Network (Router, and computer).

* Note . The Groups and Users shown in the screen-shoot are just an example. Your list will look the way your system is configured.

 

[azazel1024]

You'll also still be dependent on NetBIOS working properly, which it doesn't always (some new device always loves promoting itself to master and then not functioning properly). You'll also need to ensure each machine is setup so that network discovery is turned on.

You'll also likely need to ensure that everyone has an account on the machine with the correct user name and password already on it. Or as mentioned, the guest account route (which still will only work with Windows machines).

Honestly, the easiest thing to do is probably just go around to each computer and map the network drive. Then it'll always show up (unless the server is off). Its not that much of a hassle to do.

 

[Kroze]

How do they configured those NAS boxes or external hard drives that plug into your router work then? Don't they just show up as a drive under network? I figured if a simple device such as that can do it, why can't you do it with a PC.

 

[azazel1024]

You can.

Windows imposes access controls that most routers don't though...or at least some routers don't and some have it as optional. Its still easy enough to login, if you don't have user rights it'll prompt you for the user account name and the password and you enter it. Under windows and a lot of other OS, you can set it to remember the credentials. If you don't ever want a prompt, you'll have to make sure that the machine you are using, you are logged in with identical credentials to the server you are attempting to access (or just save the user name and password after the first prompt).

They all pretty much use NetBIOS, which is fine and works a lot of the time.

But not always. Having been around the networking world for 20 odd years, I've seen a lot of wierd behavior.

A lot depends on the clients too, like if you accidently set network discovery to off, or accidently have your network type set to public instead of private/work.

You said you wanted it done without it ever asking for a user name and password. This is possible in Windows, but its more than a single step. Windows, for all its faults, defaults to access controls...which is the proper way to do things, instead of defaulting to a no security setup.