Re: How do you wintrolls...

"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:znu-6DD72D.01151526032009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <g42dnSiPC8ArOFfUnZ2dnUVZ_gGdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A PC user exposed to a Mac will be annoyed that it logs in as 'guest'
automatically. That user will find he can't access his files, and will have
to figure out that he needs to *tell the computer* that he wants access as
himself, and *re-enter his password*. Which is obviously pretty lame.

In practice, you add the login info to your keychain the first time, and
the system will automatically log in with those credentials from then on.

Windows has this too, actually. But it won't do this if it is not necessary.

This gets rid of the prompts even if the username and password on the
remote machine are different. (Which is probably a pretty common case on
home networks.)

I don't know; on Macs, maybe, since there seems to be no benefit to synchronizing the accounts with Macs.

> The system shared the items the user probably wants shared by default.

I am quite astonished at this. Sharing the users personal files *by
default*?

To people with that user's credentials, yeah. I mean, if a user remotely
connects to a machine on which he has a user account and provides those
account credentials, exactly what files do you think he wants to access?

I think that sharing files over the network *by default* is astonishingly insecure.

It's not a question of who has access to what files.

> There are no silly counterintuitive permissions issues.

Oh? How the Mac different in this regard? I thought they had ACLs,
ownership, and all that jazz these days.

It does. But Alan appeared to have problems accessing files in a user's
own home directory after logging into the machine as that user. That
seems pretty silly.

It's not clear what went wrong. Windows has a lot of security features.

One possibility is that his old box is configured so that remote connections as local users are disallowed.

When Vista asks you if a newly discovered network is 'Public' or 'Private', this is one of the things it is doing. On a public network, file shares only have guest access. That is, no matter what credentials you try to connect with, you wind up as the guest account. This makes file shares rather less useful, but it is more secure. It's possible he did this to his old box, and now it thinks his new box is the Internet and won't trust it.

> There's an obvious one-click way to re-mount the volume with the
> right credentials after the system automatically mounts it with
> guest permissions.

That is to say, with the wrong credentials. This isn't a particularly
good thing.

Automatically trying to log into a remote machine with the local
username and password doesn't make a lot of sense on a home network. A
very common scenario on a home network is that you have several systems,
each with only one user account, belonging to the primary user of that
system.

If you do this, then you get prompted for a password. However, this isn't the case for Mr. Baker.

[snip]
Yeah, MS is always one for the greybeard switches. If they just dropped all
this stuff, a lot of people would be unhappy because the have to change
their ways. But they might be better off if they did change their ways.

OTOH, it does help to save their butts when they make a mistake. There was
much unhappiness when Apple introduced stacks and did *not* include any way
to get the old menus back. They eventually had to put one in, such was the
bitching and the moaning. MS puts those thing is from the start; think of it
as insurance.

I wouldn't quite say this is the same thing as designing a shiny new
user-friendly menu bar, but not actually managing to get all the
necessary functionality into it, such that you have to also keep the old
one.

I have not found any necessary functionality in the menu bar (and not duplicated elsewhere); as far as I can see the only the functions that are (only) in the menu bar are the greybeard switch for the old-style status bar and, oddly, the 'Invert Selection' command- which strictly speaking can always by done manually.



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