Paul McFedries is a full-time technical writer who has worked with computers in one form or another since 1975 and has used Windows since version 1 was foisted upon an unsuspecting (and underwhelmed) world in the mid-1980s. He is the author of more than 60 computer books that have sold more than three million copies worldwide. His recent titles include the Sams Publishing books 'Windows Vista Unleashed' and 'Windows Home Server Unleashed' and the Que Publishing books 'Networking with Microsoft Windows Vista', 'Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Excel 2007', 'Tricks of the Microsoft Office 2007 Gurus', and 'Microsoft Access 2007 Forms, Reports, and Queries'. Please visit Paul's website at http://www.mcfedries.com/. Paul is also the proprietor of Word Spy a website devoted to tracking new words and phrases as they enter the English language.
Hiding Your Shared Folders
Setting up user accounts with strong passwords and then applying shared-folder permissions on those accounts are the necessary network security tasks, and in most small networks they're also sufficient for achieving a decent level of security. However, when it comes to securing your network, a healthy dose of paranoia is another good "tool" to have at hand. For example, the properly paranoid network administrator doesn't assume that no one will ever infiltrate the network, just the opposite: The admin assumes that someday someone will get access, and then he or she wonders what can be done in that case to minimize the damage.
Who's Logged On?
How do you know who's logged on to a Vista machine? For example, what if you're sitting down at a client computer and you're not sure who's logged on and what privileges they have? No problem. You can use the WHOAMI command to get all kinds of useful information about the user who is currently logged on to the computer. Here's the syntax:
Enforcing Strong Passwords
You, as a savvy Windows Vista user, know how to create a strong password, and you can certainly pass along that information to the other people in your home or business, but how can you be sure that they'll take up the strong password gospel?
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Disabling the Hidden Administrative Shares
I mentioned in my previous post that you can add $ to a share name to hide the share, and that it was a good idea to also modify the share name to something not easily guessable by some snoop. Note, however, that Windows Vista sets up certain hidden shares for administrative purposes, including one for drive C: (C$) and any other hard disk partitions you have on your system. Windows Vista also sets up the following hidden shares:
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Using a Network Connection to Wake Up a Sleeping Computer
Having a computer go to sleep when you're not using it is a good idea because it conserves power. However, it can be a pain if you need to access the computer remotely over your network because you have no way to wake up the sleeping computer (which normally requires a physical action such as jiggling the mouse or pressing the computer's power button). Fortunately, most new NICs support a feature called wake-on-LAN, which enables the NIC to wake up the computer when the NIC receives a special Ethernet packet. For this to work, you must first configure the NIC to handle wake-on-LAN. Here's how...