what does Home Directory 'CONNECT TO' do?

[jepeters]

I am an amateur tech coordinator at 2 small schools. A few years back, a company came out to both schools and installed a network with an NT server in each school.

They set up the user accounts and didn't explain any of it to me. On the User Environment Profile, they set it up so that the Home Directory is to 'Connect' to Drive H and to the user's personal folder. (something like this: H:\users\students\studentname)

But I have never seen the purpose of that. What is that line supposed to accomplish? I thought it might be that whenever a student went to File | Save As in an application it would automatically open to that folder--but that's not the case.

This fall I installed Win 2000 Pro on one computer at the one of these schools. Anyone who logs in on this Win 2000 computer can only access their own folder that is indicated by the Home Directory entry. So, that makes a bit of sense. But why doesn't it do this on the Win 98 and Win 95 computers? And, why does it block access to any of the other folders that are on this shared drive? (the drive is 'H', and has many folders, including a 'Student' folder that contains individual folders for each student, but in the root of drive H there are several other folders that these students need to access, but in Explorer only shows up as 'H:\students\[student name]. Then CAN access many other shared drives.

(i can change the 'Connect To' line so that it just goes to drive H rather than to their personal directory, so I can get around the problem that way. I'm just curious as to how this thing is supposed to work)

[christo418]

Windows 2000 is an altogether different beast than W95 and W98. My suggestion is to get a book on NT Server 4.0, and pay close attention to chapters on Users and Groups, Permissions, and Trust Relationships. There are many layers of security built into Windows NT, and there are even more built into W2K. As long as you have Administrator rights, you need to know why the installers of your system did the things that they did, and you need to be able to correct any mistakes that you find, and shore up any security leaks (do you know about the Everyone account?).