Microsoft has created a rather nifty option to share resources in a server-less environment (eg a "home" or just a small office), called HomeGroup sharing. It works in Windows 7 and somehow magically builds on IPv6.

But HomeGroup sharing isn't available on XP, so you'll have to take the traditional road of right-clicking the folder you want to share, choosing Advanced sharing and setting the security bits just right (eg Share security: write for Everybody, full control for Administrators; File security: as tight as you need).

But sometimes that's not enough.

At a client with a mixed machine environment, suddenly they couldn't get to a file share residing on a Windows 7 box when coming from an XP box. I got system error 58 (or was is system error 85?). Windows croaked. I tried firewall settings, tried user rights, tried whether the fact that they'd connected to another file share on another XP box.

While i did a whole bunch of seemingly arbitrary fixing moves, after doing the following, things started happening again.

• Start the local security policy editor, secpol.msc
• Go to Local Policies > Security Options
• Scroll down to Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level
• Change the setting from "Send NTLMv2 response only" to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"

The reasoning behind this is that Windows 7 and Vista works on a newer and more secure variant of the Lan Manager protocol than XP. You might get similar problem if connecting from a Linux box or a NAS (which very well may be a Linux box) to a Windows 7. Changing this setting starts the discussion using the older version and switches to the more secure one if the two endpoints can agree on that.

Took me several hours to get this right. I hope this will help you make a swifter fix.

My previous post just made me realize a fundamental flaw in automatic
crossposting (ie., what i write on my blog gets tweeted on Twitter
which in turn is echoed on Facebook). A tweet/status update of
"Comment ground" makes Absolutely No Sense At All when seen in that
context. It might have been another cute wordplay when it was a blog
post header but when migrated, all alone, to another platform -- it
just looks stupid.

So what to do? Give all my postings tweet-friendly titles or continue
confusing people with lyrical/musical/cultural references and not get
a discussion? A human-centered approach -- taking YOU into account,
before me -- would probably be the right one, but what will i be
losing in the process?

I have a system in place where my tweets are echoed as Facebook wall
posts. What is a bit surprising to me is that i get a fair amount of
comments to Facebook on these used-to-be-tweets, a lot more than i get
responses as tweets.

While an analysis of the reasons is way beyond the scope of article,
two things emerge. The phenomenon itself, and the redundance of data.
I think it's great that my words of wyrd echo out to where me mates
are, but the fact that the possibly ensuing discussion forks into two
unconnected branches sucks. In fact, there is even little evidence
that an update on Facebook originates from somewhere else. You may be
reading this very posting through Twitter or Facebook but it
originates from Posterous.

What i'm missing is the facility to recombine the responses into one
comment stream. I don't really care where this happens, as long as
there only is one stream.

Tear down the garden walls. Interoperability is playing nice.

I've just created a two-way connection between Posterous and Facebook. Not only will this post echo from Posterous to my page on Facebook, but if anybody comments on it, comments should be echoed back to my Posterous site. Which is kind of nifty.

For this magic to happen, i needed to create a custom domain (for reasons i don't know -- i would happily have used my regular Posterous URL) and a Facebook app. As a Learning Experience, that was okay, but i do fear that you'll need to accept yet another stupid Facebook application to be able to comment.

Anway, first commenter from Facebook gets grand kudos and ten brownie points!