Platinum Edition Using® Microsoft® Windows® XP

Demystifying “Simple” File Sharing

Windows XP introduced a new network security model called Simple File Sharing. Before I explain this, I'll give you some background. In the original Windows NT/2000 workgroup network security model, when you attempted to use a shared network resource, Windows would see if your username and password matched an account on the remote computer. One of four things would happen:

• If the username and password exactly matched an account defined on the remote computer, you'd get that user's privileges on the remote machine for reading and writing files.

• If the username matched but the password didn't, you'd be prompted to enter the correct password.

• If the username didn't match any predefined account, or if you failed to ...