Chapter 31: Sharing Drives and Printers on a LAN

The true power of your SOHO LAN is the ability to share resources like printers and network drives. Perhaps you have three computers and only one printer and one Internet connection. Perhaps several people use a database from different computers, and you want to make sure that they're always working with updated information. Whatever the reason, your LAN isn't much good if you don't know how to share your hardware and files.

This chapter tells you how to share disks and folders on your own computer, use shared disks and folders on other computers, and choose which of your own disk drives to make available to other people on your LAN. We also describe how to share the printers on your system and how to use printers on other people's systems.

Note  

This chapter assumes that you have connected your computer to a workgroup-based LAN and have installed file-and printer-sharing services.

Network drives (also called shared drives ) are disk drives that have been configured to be available for use from other computers on the LAN. Similarly, shared folders are folders that have been configured to be usable by other computers on the LAN. For a disk drive or folder to be shared by other people on a LAN, it must be configured as sharable. Once a drive or folder is sharable , other people can read and write files on the disk drive or in the folder. Microsoft makes sharing a whole drive a little more difficult than sharing just a folder because of the security risks involved.

Enabling Hardware Sharing

To share your hardware-disk drives and printers-with others on the LAN, you need to make sure that sharing is enabled.

Installing file and printer sharing does not automatically share your printer and disk drives-that could compromise security. Instead, you choose exactly which resources to share on your computer by using the commands covered in this chapter.

Tip  

You can't share files or printers through a network connection that uses the Internet Connection Firewall. You should enable ICF on any connections to the outside world, so outsiders can't snoop on your network, but do not use ICF on connections to your LAN, which would prevent sharing resources with other computers on the LAN. If you use the Network Setup Wizard to configure your LAN, it automatically enables ICF on external connections but not on internal ones.