Taking ownership of files on remote computer

[Eisenbart]

Great, thanks for your help! I am really curious why I cannot even find out what my effective permissions are on the remote machine, not to mention why taking file ownership does not work.

[grue155]

Research led me to these pages:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/103390
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc749912.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv.../security.mspx

which all seem to be written for the use in a domain environment, rather than a workgroup. I would expect the same design philosophy to be used, with different fallbacks (workgroup would presume automatic fails in contacting a domain, for example). I haven't been thru the W2k3 document yet, as the details in the KB pages are a bit dense for my background. It is educational A lot of things seem to be coming back to KB103390, so that seems to be something central to understanding what's going on.

[Eisenbart]

I almost thought I had found a solution...

I found out that while it is possible to take ownership of a file on a remote computer for the administrator, the file's owner will then be set to the administrator's SID on the local rather than on the remote computer. In other words, the owner will be set to a user not known on the machine where the file is located, which is not a good thing of course. I guess that for this reason, trying the same thing with a limited user account fails.

I also learned that while it is not possible to set the owner of a file on a remote computer to the administrator's remote SID, it is quite possible to set the file's owner to the remote computer's administrator group. This brought me to the idea of creating a group for myself on the remote computer and setting the owner of the files in the backup data to my group rather than to myself as a limited user.

Unfortunately, this did not work and I don't know why. I created the group and made myself a member of it, but when I went to the dialog for changing the owner of a file on the remote computer, my group did not show up in the list of candidates for new ownership. I also tried creating the same group on the local computer, but this did not help either.

So how come I can change the owner of a file on a remote computer to a group that the administrator belongs to, but not to a group that a limited user belongs to?

[grue155]

So how come I can change the owner of a file on a remote computer to a group that the administrator belongs to, but not to a group that a limited user belongs to?

Sorry for the delay in getting back to the topic. Dayjob has gotten rather busy, as sometimes happens this time of year.

In a domain environment, all of that would be working because all user identification would be done against the domain auth server. But in a workgroup environment, there is no auth server, and each machines checks only against its local data. So, if it can work in the local environment, it should be possible to have the same operation when a remote user logs into the local machine as a local user. I think of it as telepathic projection, and who's fingerprints and DNA are left at the scene that got past the ID checks.

To my knowledge, the only difference between a limited user and an admin user is the permission settings. It could also be that there is some magic bit that gets turned off with a limited user, and so some things just won't work without that magic bit being enabled. Like in *ix systems, root admin has the permissions, and the uid=0 as the magic bit. User without that uid=0, can't do anything that needs root authority regardless of what the permissons say. That could very well be what you're running into. I don't know if Windows has that equivalent uid=0, so some more research seems to be in order.

[Eisenbart]

The way things look like at the moment, there's seems to be no way around installing a second hard drive into my primary computer and storing my backup data there instead of moving it to my secondary computer... But thanks anyway for investing so much time to help me with my problem!

[grue155]

Glad to have been of some kind of help. I must say, it's been very educational for me. For that, I get to say Thank You!