My boss finally wore out her poor ol' HP Compaq nx9010 and I needed to temporarily transfer all her files to another laptop until her new one gets ordered. I had to wait until the end of the day and take both laptops home with me to work on, so as not to interrupt her. Not having a crossover cable with me, my plan was to get both laptops connected to my home router, set up a shared folder, and copy files over.
However, strange things happen with sharing security when your computers are part of a domain...and you're not connected to the domain. What would happen is I would try to connect to the shared folder of one computer from the other and I'd get a message saying something to the effect of "no log on servers could be found" or something like that. Essentially, even when I was using the local administrator account as my sign in, the authentication would not complete and I couldn't connect. I'm sure there's some kind of fix for this, but I didn't want to fool with it - I had a better, quicker idea.
I stuck an Ubuntu LiveCD in the target laptop (the newer one) and booted it up, leaving the nx9010 still running XP. I set the nx9010 to completely share out the user profile for my boss, and then used Ubuntu to do a Samba connect to that shared folder. It still asked for a login, but logging in as the local administrator account with the workgroup set to WORKGROUP did the trick. Then I had Ubuntu mount the hard drive on the newer laptop and proceeded with copying the files. Flawless!
Again, I'm sure there's a fix or a workaround for the issue I was having, but Ubuntu saved me the trouble of researching it. That makes my day :)
Friday, August 21, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)