SolveYourProblem
eLearning Series
Wireless Networking
Sharing
Your Files and Folders Wirelessly
by Jeff Cohen
Once
your computers are networked together and sharing Internet
access, the next step is to make your internal network a
little more useful. One of the best things you can do with
your wireless network is use it to share your files and folders.
Look
Out for Security
Before
I tell you how to share folders, a quick word of warning:
if you don't have encryption set up on your network, then
everything you share will be available for others to view.
This means that anyone could bring their computer close enough
to connect to your wireless connection (and in many cases,
your neighbours are close enough), and they could see everything
you've put in a shared folder.
How
do you get around this? There are two things you can do:
only share things that you wouldn't mind other people seeing,
or turn on encryption for your network. If you want to change
shared files from other computers as well as just uploading
and downloading them, you definitely need encryption. For
more, see 'Dealing with Security Threats: Wireless Encryption'.
Automatic
Sharing
Ff
you're happy to put your shared files in a special folder,
you don't need to do any extra configuration. Windows automatically
shares your 'Shared Documents' folder when you create a wireless
network, to give you a space to share pictures and music
across your network. To access the Shared Documents folders,
just open My Network Places using the Start Menu.
Sharing
More
Of
course, most people want to share more than one folder. I,
for example, want to be able to access Word documents I'm
working on from any computer on my network, without saving
them outside My Documents. Luckily, you can access any files
across the network, as long as they are in the same folder
together.
To
share an existing folder, simply right-click it and choose
'Sharing and Security'. Tick 'Share this folder on the network'
in the box that appears. If you want to be able to change
the files from other computers, you should also tick 'Allow
network users to change my files' -- if you don't do that,
then the files will be read-only when you use another computer
to access them.
Remember
that sharing files over the network can be slow, depending
on how fast your wireless equipment is. Because of the way
Windows works, you should try to avoid keeping lots of files
in the same shared folder, as it can slow down the network
more than you might expect.
You
Can Even Share Drives
You
can share whole drives, if you want to. You should never
do this for your whole hard drive, though, as it is very
dangerous -- anyone who could get access to your network
would be able to see everything on your computer, including
all sorts of private information that you probably wouldn't
want them to have. Worse, if you had it set to allow the
network to change files, your computer could get messed up
big time.
Where
drive sharing becomes useful, then, is to share removable
drives. You can right-click anything from a CD drive to a
floppy drive, and share it over your network. The procedure
is the same as turning on sharing for a folder, except that
there is an extra step where you need to click to confirm
to Windows that you understand the risks involved.
Once
a removable drive is shared, you can do all sorts of things.
You can use software that needs the CD to run as long as
the CD is in one of your computers, or you can save to floppy
disk from computers that don't have floppy disk drives --
the possibilities, as they say, are endless.
With
a little lateral thinking, you can take this even further.
Devices like digital cameras and mp3 players almost always
appear in My Computer as drives while they're plugged in
-- turning on sharing for these drives basically means that
you're sharing the devices across the whole network. It's
really neat to be able to plug your camera into one computer
and then download the photos on to all of them -- give it
a go!
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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