Hi, this is my first time posting in any type of forum so please bare with me. I have searched this forum and the user manual for my Net Gear Ultra 4 server for answers and could not find exactly what i was looking for so it leaves me with generating a new thread. My computer knowledge and computer hardware knowledge is fairly good, but my knowledge when it comes to Networking sucks - which is proabably the reason I cant figure this out.
I will start of by describing my "setup"
The Netgear ultra 4 has 4 drives installed and is being used in a home setting. primary purpose is to store data in a central location which is backed up in a Raid and can be accessed by multiple devices on my home network.
The server has 4 Share folders (Backup, Files, Music, Pictures, Videos). Most are self explanatory. I use the backup folder for my windows PC's. Im running Acronis True Image on each PC...Acronis saves incremental copies of my drives to this folder on my server.
I have 2 windows PC's (both Win 7). One is mine and the other is being used by the kids
I also have a suite of tablets, smartphones and smart TV's (mostly all running Android).
And i have One Chrome Book thats used by the wife for surfing.
I have a combination of hardwired and wireless devices. My PC and the TV's are wired. Everything else is wireless. The TV's are wired because i use them to access the server folders named Music, Pictures and Videos to stream the music, whatch videos etc.
I think i have described my network in enough detail.....So now i will get to my question....
In the past when it was just my wife and I on my home network I was not concerned with the security/integrity of the files stored on the server. As a result I simply set all my share folders to Read/Write as the default access to all folders and subfolders. As i said this was fine until we now have more and more users accessing our wireless network....Kids friends, Wifes friends/parents etc. Im worried that one of them will simply open up windows explorer, navigate to network and start browsing my server or worse yet deleting data from the server. I guess one solution would be to set up a Guest password to my wifi router, but there are times that I would like for some of these users to have read access to my server.
So how do i set up my server so that My PC has full read/write access to all files/folders on the server (perferably through the standard windows explorer Network 'folder') while any and all other devices that connect to my network will only have read access to the folders on my server via the same windows explorer Network folder?
For instance I still want my tablets and TV's to be able to view and stream the content from the Music, Pictures and Video shares located on the server.
Also If/when i upgrade my PC to a newer model how would i make that PC the so called "admin" pc for the server?
Hi. If you want to keep it simple, what you could do is set the default access to read/only on all the shares, create a user (username and password) and grant read/write access to this user. On the Windows machine, you can go to control panel, search for "manage network passwords" and add the set of credentials of the read/write user (\\nas, username, password). Also, don't confuse redundancy and backup. A RAID array provide redundancy, it's not a backup. It doesn't protect you against file deletion, share deletion, multiple disk failure (the limit depends on your level of RAID), cryptolockers, catastrophic failure or destruction of the unit, where an external backup could.
You could set the default share access to "read-only" on the cifs page for each share. Then add "admin" as a write-enabled user.
Check first that guest access only allows read-only. Then go into windows credential manager on your PC, and delete any NAS credentials that are already stored, Then add two new ones (one for the IP address of the NAS and one for the name of the NAS). Use admin for the username and the NAS admin password. Then of course validate that those credentials work.
Try this on one share first, and then once it checks out apply it to the rest.
guys thanks for the replies. Linking the specific PC to the server was the step i was missing. I will be trying it out later today or tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes or if i have any other questions.
Also I appreciate the info regarding redundancy vs backup. I completely agree.
