Having a drive (dedicated partition) on one Windows 11 machine on a private network available to all others

britechguy

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First, let me say that I am not trying to do this either for myself or someone else, but a question about this has come up elsewhere and has me curious as to whether it can be accomplished, and how.

The description of the setup, broadly speaking, is that there are multiple Win11 computers on a shared Private network. On one of these machines, the data partition was separated out from the Windows partition, and given a drive letter, E, in this case, on that machine. The explanation of what's wanted is this, "for several months, my friend was able to access all the folders on the new partition from the other computers over his network, but, since last October or so, Windows or something has changed the permitions for some of the folders on the new partition, while allowing total access to others."

The way I read this is that the intent is to kinda-sorta create an NAS-ish situation where the data partition on the computer where that was set up is being treated as a common repository that they want to be totally accessible to any other computer on the network, whether for reading and/or writing existing files, or creating new folders and/or files.

I know that this is a terrible idea, but I also wonder if it's even possible to set it up such that it would work as desired, given all the current security constraints that Windows imposes (and for good reason)? If it is possible, how would one do it?
 
I normally hate just linking a youtube, but Rich does a great job explaining how and why M$ broke this with Windows 11... and what the solution is.

 
Yes, and the video makes me cringe a bit, because the only "change" is that you have to specifically enable the service now.

The error... is that Entra ID based authentication against the Server service for access, doesn't always work. We had a project blow up because of it, Windows Server, if hosted in Azure, can be Entra native joined and leverage Entra IT for permissions.

Worked perfectly... until we put a load on the Server service (SMB) the intermittent access issues that followed burned time for two weeks, until we gave up and went back to AD... no other change... but now... just works.
 
With W10 I pretty much stopped doing hacks/work arounds for file sharing on modern MS OS. Sometimes update would break it. Other times theres gremlins running around. So I just tell them if they want local storage it'll be a NAS running Linux.
 
So I just tell them if they want local storage it'll be a NAS running Linux.

I need to work on my sales pitch for this solution. We have a bunch of these in the field, but most customers got them primarily because they outgrew peer-to-peer sharing, and weren't ready yet for M365 or a server. Now, when I have a workgroup customer that experiences sharing issues (had one this past week in fact), the push back is always "but it worked yesterday!". They'd rather (apparently) pay for my time mucking around with it every time it breaks as opposed to fixing it once with a NAS setup.

The fix of changing the permissions items in group policy isn't involved, but you just know it's going to break again when an update forces those items back to the default choices, you know, for security!
 
break again when an update forces those items back to the default choices, you know, for security!
This is why I gave up, long ago, trying to do hack's, exploits etc for software licenses. A friend I started working with some 15 years ago had a copy of QB Enterprise and the key. When they had a problem they'd inevitably say why are you charging me labor for this when you gave it for free. He'd ask me to help and I'd tell tough you-know-what.
 
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