ntfs permissions and domains ?

I'm just wondering if there's a better way of doing this...

I've got an XP Pro desktop at work that's attached to our corporate domain. I've got a personal notebook that I use in lieu of a corporate laptop, it's XP Pro but not attached to the domain, our IT guys offered to attach it, but since it's my personal notebook I didn't want to. I have local admin privileges on my desktop. The intent is to be able to synchronize my desktop with an offline-available folder on my notebook.

The only way I have been able to get it to work was to create an local account called "synch" on my desktop, give it appropriate permissions for the share and authenticate with that login when mapping from my notebook. The synch account is part of the administrators group as well.

It works reasonably well. I can easily synch files created or modified on my notebook to my desktop, but I do run into permission issues when synching files created or modified on my desktop. Since the files are created and owned by my domain account, XP won't allow "snych" to access them. The only way around it is to access the permissions on the My Documents folder (that includes permissions for snych) and force those permissions to propogate to all subfolders and files. Once I've done that, I can access the files with no issues.

It would be much easier if I was able to access the share on my desktop using my domain credentials, but XP doesn't seem to allow that from a non-attached system. I'm not an MS networking guru, so I don't know if that's by design or something I'm doing wrong.

Anyways, I'm just wondering if there's an easier way of doing this. I'd like to be able to simply snych my files back and forth transparently, without having to fiddle with the permissions each time.

Any ideas or advice is much appreciated...

Cheers,
KV

Before you access any of the desktop's folders from your network, run the following (use a shortcut to keep it handy):

Code:

net use \\desktopname /user:domainname\username *

Enter your domain password when prompted.

That will cause all the accesses to the desktop machine to be with your domain credentials, so you should avoid the permissions problems.

Thanks Tuttle, I'll try that tomorrow when I'm in the office. Will it work once for persistent connections, or would I have to run it as a script each time I login ?

Cheers,
KV

I suspect you'll have to run it each time you boot. It's not a persistent mapping in the same sense that a drive letter is.

If you really want to automate it you can replace the * with your domain password, but I don't recommend that for obvious reasons. :)