Domain shares and Windows Vista

Our network is administered by North Coast Region / North Coast Institute of TAFE, and is operating in the North Coast Region domain. (ncr.edu.win)

Computers installed by NCR are automatically part of the domain and can connect seamlessly to our local fileserver.

Teachers are permitted, with principal approval, to connect their personal laptop to the network.

Recently some teachers runnning Vista have done this. One of these teachers wished to connect to her domain "home" share.

The ncr technicians said it was complicated.

This is a description of how I assisted her to do that.

We had a head start because she already had a "my files" set up in the portal that pointed to her share. eg in north coast domain for staff home directory: \\servername.ncr.edu.win\schoolcode$\StaffHome\usershortname\

The path on this link could then be pasted into the "address bar" part of a Vista window, eg "Computer".

The user was then asked to authenticate. The username staff.det.win\shortname was entered, along with the normal password, the share was mounted and a shortcut or drive mapping could be created.

This type of thing can also be done in order to allow computers using MacOSX and linux to access these file servers.