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I have small office network having 5 PCs running Windows 7 ultimate edition. All PCs are on same work-group named "WGXYZ" and connected to same home-group created by PC1.

PC1 has printer which is shared and used by all computers thus all PCs are on same home-group.

I'm looking to share a folder on PC3 with read/write permission for PC4 without password protection as the file store will be used by PC4 & PC3 simultaneously however no other PC should have access to the said folder. This is supposed to be simple stuff and I can't determine that it is possible in windows 7 environment.

I have tried to find answer but almost all threads I've seem lead to dead end so I'm open to alternates to accomplish this task.

Thanks!

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  • File sharing and permission is set for the user, not for the computer. We can try to allow only the IP address of PC4 to access the shared port of PC3 through the firewall. Windows shares use these ports, such as 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 445.
    – Daisy Zhou
    Jan 2, 2019 at 11:54
  • @DaisyZhou Could you please elaborate
    – LEO
    Jan 2, 2019 at 11:58

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The proper solution is to use Active Directory to grant PC4 permission to use this share so that anybody who logs in to PC4 can use it. This is the way Microsoft intends to support this type of security. You probably don't have have active directory. In lieu of this, It was correctly pointed out that while you can give the permissions of a folder to a computer, you cannot authenticate as a computer over the network; you must authenticate as a user. Therefore this is pointless.

You should set up a faceless user account on PC3, set the folder permissions to allow this user to R/W, deny 'Everyone', and direct people using PC4 to use these credentials when prompted to login to the shared folder. Regrettably, this requires a password.

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    This does not sound right even for AD. As far as I know, if the SMB client authenticates as a user account, it only gets the permissions assigned to that user account – the machine account is not involved in the process at all. (It is only used for connections made by system services where there's no user.) Jan 2, 2019 at 23:09
  • You are correct, my mistake.
    – Andy
    Jan 2, 2019 at 23:16
  • @Andy faceless user account is services account? plz explain steps
    – LEO
    Jan 3, 2019 at 10:55
  • A faceless account is a just a normal user account. Faceless implies that the name on the account isn't a person. For example, my windows account is 'andy', but I might use a faceless account 'share_user' on a shared machine. Just create a new unprivileged user in windows and grant the user access to any needed shares.
    – Andy
    Jan 3, 2019 at 17:48

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