Several months ago, more like a year I assembled my first venture into file-serving out in Afghanistan, because everyone wanted network access to their external HDD,s which varied in content and connection method. Well I got tired of my machine being a surrogate to all these externals, some of which were questionable in content, and even more tired of beating into peoples heads how to properly share a drive, and that in order to do that they could not disconnect it, power it off, or any of the myriad of things your average user manages to do to throw a monkey wrench into your carefully laid plans.
I then decided to assemble a file server, a separate machine that I could RemoteAccess to, that could be destroyed by a virus, or some such, but not affect any of the other machines on the network. I had almost no money and limited resources, so the machine wound up being constructed out of sheet metal, 300USD worth of parts, an AMD Sempron, and a MATX board, several PCI->SATA adapters, and lots of dust filters. The operating system? Windows XP Pro, since I had a "copy" on hand. The remote access let me avoid having another UI to deal with, saving more money! Horray! I had a tight budget, 2 way satellite internet out of the UK is NOT cheap. Well, soon after, I discovered that windows XP's "Simple" file sharing was not going to cut it, so I started researching alternatives. I came across XP's "non-simple filesharing" In which permissions were set for individual users. Finally! All drives have full access to me, and distributed read-only or ect. Worked great until about 2 months ago when XP went belly up. Never one to be worried, as I kept the OS drive strictly an OS, I reformatted it, and re-installed XP. I am sure you can see the problem from here, The files are all read-only now. I get an access denied when i try to write to the drives. Not a big deal, as I could just transfer the data to somewhere else, format the damn thing, and put it back, except that I do not have that storage capacity. I have 3 400GB and 2 80GB drives that are "locked" and only a 120GB for transfer....
So, how does one solve this problem?
I then decided to assemble a file server, a separate machine that I could RemoteAccess to, that could be destroyed by a virus, or some such, but not affect any of the other machines on the network. I had almost no money and limited resources, so the machine wound up being constructed out of sheet metal, 300USD worth of parts, an AMD Sempron, and a MATX board, several PCI->SATA adapters, and lots of dust filters. The operating system? Windows XP Pro, since I had a "copy" on hand. The remote access let me avoid having another UI to deal with, saving more money! Horray! I had a tight budget, 2 way satellite internet out of the UK is NOT cheap. Well, soon after, I discovered that windows XP's "Simple" file sharing was not going to cut it, so I started researching alternatives. I came across XP's "non-simple filesharing" In which permissions were set for individual users. Finally! All drives have full access to me, and distributed read-only or ect. Worked great until about 2 months ago when XP went belly up. Never one to be worried, as I kept the OS drive strictly an OS, I reformatted it, and re-installed XP. I am sure you can see the problem from here, The files are all read-only now. I get an access denied when i try to write to the drives. Not a big deal, as I could just transfer the data to somewhere else, format the damn thing, and put it back, except that I do not have that storage capacity. I have 3 400GB and 2 80GB drives that are "locked" and only a 120GB for transfer....
So, how does one solve this problem?
