The ShareUI Tool

In Darren Mar-Elia, "10 Resource Kit Remote Administration Tools," April 2001, Darren mentions that Windows NT doesn't provide a nice way to create shares through the Windows UI. I think the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit ShareUI utility is an excellent tool for this task. You can install this utility on Windows 2000 Professional and NT 4.0 systems. (When you use it on Win2K Pro systems, you'll receive script errors that you can ignore.)

After you install shareui.inf from the resource kit, use Windows Explorer to browse to a machine in your network. When you select a system, the right pane will display the system's shares, its Printers folder, and a new Shared Directories folder, which shows all the system's shares—even hidden shares. Double-click a share to display its properties, then right-click any empty space in the folder. In the resulting pop-up menu, select New, then select Share. Selecting Share lets a user with Administrator permissions create a new share on the system.

I use this method all the time. You can even use the ShareUI tool to restore administrative shares and add or modify share permissions.

—Stephen Cicirelli
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