I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and immediately noticed how unbelievably clunky they’ve managed to make file sharing and permissions work.
My media center is a modded Xbox with XBMC running, and normally I just share a folder on my PC where all my downloads go. Strangely enough, with Windows 7, XBMC wouldn’t detect any files in my shared folder at all!
After fooling around with Windows 7, I discovered the following:
Windows 7 has 3 types of ‘Networks’ you can connect to – Home, Work and Public. Home and Work are extremely stringent with how files are shared, because not only do you have to share the folders, the files inside must have share permissions set for people to see them. This can get annoying because files that say uTorrent create, never have shared permissions, even if they are created inside a directory which is already shared.
Well there are a couple of solutions to this:
- You can manually set file permissions each time you download a new file. You do this by Right-clicking on the parent folder that contains all your shares. Properties > Security > Advanced. Click the “Change Permissions…” button then Check “Replace all child object permissions…”
- You can copy the file to another shared folder. This should ‘reset’ the file permission to whatever the folder you are copying to.
- You can set your network to Public. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, if you are running your own home network, chances are you know exactly who is connected to your network at any given time. Setting your network to public means you can share a folder without having to set file permissions individually, which is good, since consoles can’t really identify themselves to Windows 7 anyway.
Other things which you need to do are to get rid is 128-bit password protection in Advanced Sharing Settings in Control panel. Make sure it’s set to ‘Enable file sharing for devices that use 40 or 56 bit encryption’ as the Xbox doesn’t support it. And finallly, in the Homegroups section, make sure ‘Use user accounts and passwords to connect to other computers’ is checked.