Tech Tip: Secure network shares/Mount a volume in an empty NTFS folder

by Guest Contributor | Dec 08, 2003 2:55:00 PM

Tags: Guest Contributor, Windows 2000 Professional Tips Newsletter

Takeaway:

Windows 2000 Professional: Secure network shares

Network shares are one of the mechanisms that worms and viruses use to spread. They often look for shares with no restrictive security and plant contaminated files in the shares to also infect the computers of users who access those files.

You can reduce your network's susceptibility to worms and viruses by tightening security on network shares. Take these steps to protect your network from worms and viruses:

• Ensure that all shares are stored on NTFS volumes, and convert FAT volumes as necessary.
• Remove the Everyone group from the sharing and NTFS permissions, and add only those security groups or user accounts that should have access to the share.
• Where possible, hide shares from browsing by adding a dollar sign [$] to the end of the share name.

In addition to these steps, firewalls, virus scrubbers, and adding security patches to your operating systems and applications are other important ways to further reduce your organization's susceptibility to worms and viruses.

Windows 2000 Server: Mount a volume in an empty NTFS folder

Managing server disk space can be a continuing battle, even when features such as disk quotas are in place. As a disk fills up, it often causes services and applications to fail.

Windows 2000 introduced a feature called mounted volumes that can help administrators overcome disk cramp. You can mount a new volume in an empty NTFS folder, which makes the volume appear to applications and users as if it's part of the original disk's file structure.

For example, assume you have a folder named \Users on drive C, and the disk is reaching capacity. The \Users folder contains 4 GB of data. You can add a new 120-GB disk to the server, move the contents of the existing \Users folder to the new disk, and mount that volume in the now empty \Users folder. The result is a C drive that now has 4 GB of additional free space and a \Users folder that has 116 GB of free space for more user data.

To mount a volume, first install the new disk in the server, partition it, and format it. Next, create or empty an NTFS folder, open the Disk Management console, right-click the new volume, and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths. Click Add, select Mount In The Following Empty NTFS Folder, specify the NTFS folder, and click OK. Click OK again, and close the Disk Management console.

Note that you can assign a drive letter to a mounted volume, enabling you to access it either from its drive letter or its mount point.