Chapter 29: Sharing Drives and Printers on a LAN

Chapter Introduction

If you have a LAN, you probably set it up because you have resources that you want to share. Perhaps you have three computers and only one printer. 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.

This chapter assumes that you have connected your computer to a workgroup-based LAN and have installed file-sharing and printer-sharing services (see Chapters 27 and 28). If your computer is connected to a domain-based LAN, contact your LAN administrator for information about what shared resources are available.

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.