Share Folders

The next stage involves creating the shares themselves, setting share permissions, and setting caching options for each share. Everything is performed through the Server Manager.

NOTE: You use the Server Manager console because it gives you access to every server management feature. The File Server Resource Management stand-alone console is mostly useful for file server management delegation purposes.

1. Go to Server Manager and navigate to the Roles | File Services | Share and Storage Management node.
2. Click Provision Share in the actions pane.
3. In the Provision A Shared Folder Wizard, click drive D: and then click Browse.
4. This opens a dialog box that lists all of the hidden shares on the server. Click D$ and navigate to the folder you want to share-for example, Data\UserData$. Click OK and click Next.
5. You don't need to change NTFS settings, so click Next.
6. For Windows users, click SMB to share the folder. This enables server message block (SMB) shares, which is the Windows default. If you are using UserData$, you do not need to change the share name.
7. For non-Windows users, click NFS. This enables the Network File System (NFS), which lets UNIX and Macintosh users access your shares. If you are using UserData$, change the share name to UserData by removing the dollar sign at the end of the name.
   NOTE: You cannot use the same share name twice.
8. Click Next. Add a description to your share, and note its settings. There is no user limit by default, access-based enumeration or the enumeration of network shares based on user access rights is on by default, and offline settings are set to the default. In the case of UserData$, you need to change this last setting. Click Advanced.
9. Move to the Caching tab, and select All Files And Programs That Users Open From The Share Are Automatically Available Offline. Also make sure that Optimized For Performance is selected. Click OK and then click Next.
10. In the next page, select Full Control for administrators and Read Access and Write Access for all other users and groups. Click Next.
11. If you are sharing this folder for non-Windows users, you will have an NFS page displayed. Modify the access rights to grant read-write access to all machines. Click All Machines and click Edit. Make sure you are using the right encoding method, and click the drop-down list to select Read-Write. Click OK, and click Next.
    CAUTION: Do not allow anonymous access, as it gives too much access to this share.
12. On this page, you can apply a custom quota to this share if you need to. Otherwise, click Next.
13. Now you can apply a file screen if you need to. However, file screens are not recommended because they are easy to circumvent and they take up a lot of server resources. Click Next.
14. The next screen lets you publish this share into a Distributed File System (DFS) namespace. No namespaces have been set up yet, so click Next.
15. Review your settings and click Create to create the share. Click Close when done.

As you can see, this is a lot of work. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to speed up this process.

You're almost done. Now, the only thing left is to make the shares available to users. This is done through Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS).