Benjamin,

I'll just elaborate on Les' suggestion, and give a couple of reasons why it is a better way of doing things.

In the bad old days of Win9x, the only way to get access to a shared resource was to map a drive letter to it. This meant that if you had 500 users and you wanted each of them to have a drive letter which mapped to their home drive you had to have 500 network shares.

Now, that's an awful lot of overhead both in management by support staff and for the file server to manage.

If you don't need to support Win9x however, there is a better option. NT, XP Windows 2000 / 3000 all support deep mapping. (Not sure about ME - anyone?)

Deep mapping allows you to map a drive to a folder within a share. This is how you do it.

On your file server, create a directory "users", and share it as "users$". Set folder and share permissions such that all you users can access it but not add/change/delete anything in in.

Within this folder create the invividual home directory (jsmith), and change the folder permissions such that only the user (and administrators) can use it. Do not share this directory.

Now, you can map John Smith's H: drive:
Code:
Use H: \\fileserver\users$\jsmith


You only have one share to worry about.

Mapping this way gives an added benefit. In my organisation we also map a drive letter to the top level \\fileserver\users$ share for all our users. This is because where staff are on (say) maternity leave it is easy to give permissions to the folder to allow their managers access to their data without mucking about with the structure.

If you do have to support some Win9x clients then of course you can still share out the users directories in those specific cases.

The only drawback to this is that where the login id matches the share name you are effectively divulging the login IDs of all your users which might be a security concern in some companies, but to be honest the mail global address list provides this level of information anyway. It is also not much less secure than using "hidden" shares, which of course aren't hidden at all.