Help on shared folder security on network

[winman]

I hope this thread is at the right place. We have windows server 2003 and windows XP clients (peer-perr network). How do I secure shared folders on a shared drive? I want to make certain folders on a shared drive available only to authorised persons, ideally through a password protect.I tried the NTFS security option. Right click on the shared folder-sharing and security tab- security- advanced- and added authenticated users. Then i went to the sharing tab- permissions-add. When i tried to add users here, i found that i could see only the local users and local groups. How do i add network users here? Or is there an alternate method? Any help regarding this willl be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!

[drivenbywhat]

The joys of networking, lol. In a peer to peer group there is no "central management". Authenticated users won't do you much because no user are authenticated to that server to begin with since it is just another pc right now. If you had Active Directory installed on it then the users you created in it would be authenticated from whatever computer they log in. So to answer your question, you need to create a local user on your server to access that folder. So when someone from a client pc tries to access that folder, they will be prompted for a user/pass which will be the local user created on that server for that folder.

[chris128]

Again I dont think this has anything to do with programming at all so why ask it on a programming forum :S

I'd agree with what drivenbywhat said though, without a domain environment you cant do a lot with permissions. If you're using Server 2003 then all you need to do is install Active Directory (Domain Controller) and DNS and then you can setup users in there and assign them to the ACL (NTFS security tab) of these shared directories.
Oh and by the way, you can pretty much ignore the Share permissions bit and just use NTFS permissions - just set the Share permissions to everyone = Full Control and then use the NTFS permissions to lock the directory down.