Windows 7 Folder Redirection - Folder not visible on server via UNC to other users
Workstation - Windows 7 ProServer: 2003 SBSSituation: We have two new Windows 7 machines at this client site. Both users are using folder redirection for thier My Documents folder. They are redirecting to \\server\users\%username%, which works great. Apparently, in the past, they were using the \\server\users folder as a mapped drive in which users could access eachother's My Documents folders. Well after the implimentation of Windows 7, the two users on the 7 machines, you can no longer see thier folder in the \\server\users folder. Thier named folders still exist as you can browse to them via unc (\\server\users\username)if you enter the full path in, also if you login as an admin on either Windows 7 station they show up as well, it just doesn't show up when logged in another user or as the user it belongs to. I have checked NTFS permissions and they look fine, in fact the user questioning this has full control of the other user's folder (not my idea).Is there a way I can make the two folders in question show up so they can be browsed by users accessing the \\server\users folder?Thank you,Ryan
March 8th, 2010 11:54pm

No doubt you've checked this, but what attributes are set on those folders? That's the first thing I'd check. Not being able to see them with Explorer yet being able to go to them by typing in the full path name sounds suspiciously like Explorer is just treating them as hidden.Can you see them if you enable display of hidden and system files in Explorer's Tools - Folder Options menu?Beyond that I'd suspect some kind of UAC magic intended to protect one user from another. Do you have UAC enabled on the system on which you are trying to browse the \\server\users folder?-Noel
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March 9th, 2010 1:59am

Noel,I have indeed adjusted both "Show hidden files, folders and drives" as well as "Hide protected operating system files" as I was thinking the same as you.I have not tried turning off UAC or adjusting it, I will give that a shot as well.I agree with you on the magic portion as well, seems like even though the NTFS permissions apply explicity to the user in question (that would like to view the other user's folder) - she has modify, that something is still hiding the folder from explorer.I will try the UAC options, and also see if they are available from an XP station when exploring/UNC and will report back.Thanks!Ryan
March 9th, 2010 5:51am

Folders are visible when logging in as the user on an XP machine via mapped drive and UNC.Turning off UAC didn't seem to help either.Back to where I started.Anyone have any suggestions?
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March 9th, 2010 6:24am

Hello,Do you meant that the user can open the mapped drive and see other folders but their own folders ? 1. Try to delete the mapped drive and re-add it and see if the issue persists.2. In win7 computer, open Sync Center. Is there a sync partnership with "\\server\users" folder? If yes, try to manually sync the folder.Thomas77
March 9th, 2010 11:07am

Man, that's worrisome. We're seeing more and more "magic" moving into the actual file system (up through Vista it seemed mostly limited to Explorer). There's definitely some there somewhere, because Users subfolders on other systems sometimes magically change names, and I've noticed a change in this behavior on Windows 7 vs. Vista. Haven't quite put my finger on it, but something's different.No doubt you have checked the share permissions as well as the file permissions.What are the ownership and permissions, exactly? Perhaps there's a detail in there that you missed and a closer review will turn it up.-Noel
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March 9th, 2010 12:23pm

Thomas,The drive is mapped to u: \\server\usersEach user has their own folder at \\server\users\%username% which is where their my documents reside.When either user on Windows 7 opens the U: drive or browses to \\server\users\ they can not see their own or the other Windows 7 user's folder.i.e. UserA and UserB are are the Windows 7 users. When they open U: or browse to \\server\users\ they see:UserCUserDUserEIf you login as UserA or UserB on a WindowsXP station or Windows2003 server and browse to U: or \\server\users\ you can see:UserAUserBUserCUserDUserEIt appears you can not see the UserA and UserB folders when on a Windows7 machine, unless you are logged in as the domain admin account.
March 9th, 2010 6:06pm

Noel,Share permissions on the folder "users" set to "everyone - full control". No share set on actual username folders.Folder owner of %username% folder i.e. UserA is "Administrators (Domain\Administrators)". UserB is "Administrators (Domain\Administrators) - the same.It doesn't seem to be a permissions issue as the folders show up when logged in to an XP machine as UserA and UserB, it seems to be more of a Windows7 Issue not allowing us to see the folder in explorer.Ryan
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March 9th, 2010 6:20pm

Just checking all bases. And you say that the users themselves each have an entry in the others' folder permissions granting them Full Control, right?Hm... Triggered a memory... Seems to me I may have seen attributes on a Windows 7 system that are not the normal set. Can't quite recall; it's been a while (some time early last year with the Windows 7 beta), but I remember thinking I was seeing an attribute in binary while debugging a program that didn't belong in the typical set (_A_ARCH, _A_HIDDEN, _A_RDONLY, etc). I filed it under "interesting info that I might investigate later"...Looking in the Windows SDK I don't find any additional definitions, but I'm going to scout around to see if Microsoft has created a new "hide in Explorer" attribute they're not telling us about.-NoelP.S., This is the known set. Notice there are two positions not used.Name Value Meaning_A_NORMAL 0x00 Normal file _A_RDONLY 0x01 Read-only file _A_HIDDEN 0x02 Hidden file _A_SYSTEM 0x04 System file _A_VOLID 0x08 Volume ID _A_SUBDIR 0x10 Subdirectory _A_ARCH 0x20 File changed since last archive Edit: I've uncovered evidence there's an "Alias" bit at position 0x40. Still looking...
March 9th, 2010 8:30pm

Hi We updated our school to Windows 7 this year. Our students all have a home drive on the server that is mapped via a share UNC. My documents are redirected to the that UNC. With Windows XP clients I can go into any logged on students folder and access any data stored there. With a windows 7 client any redirect folder is locked. The only way I can access it from the server is if I take ownership of the folders. The folder permissions are correct, as an admin I have full control but I cannot access them, I can take ownership and then access them but that then break it for the students. Something new in Windows 7 I guess.
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March 19th, 2010 1:27am

Hi, I too have also experienced a variant of this issue. The Windows 7 user is called David and the domain is called ukoffice. On the Win 7 machine, whilst logged on with david\ukoffice, if you go to C:\Users\ you cannot see the users folder (david.ukoffice), but if you type into the address/location bar C:\User\david.ukoffice\ you get there OK. I've check for anything weird with junctions and thats not effecting anything here as far as I can tell. I've checked the obvious "show hidden files" option in Folder Options, and that is set correctly. Also to confirm that this is the same issue as described above, i've connected to the desktop from a win XP machine (\\192.168.0.20\c$\Users) and the folder is there, it's attributes state it is set to hidden but hidden files are set to be shown, so that shouldn't effect things. The same happens in the cmd line interface, if you dir C:\Users, the folder david.ukoffice does not appear, but you can cd into C:\Users\david.ukoffice\ with no problems. What's going on here? It's not a show stopped but it doesn't seem intuitive to hide folders and files that are obviously there when you've asked to be shown all files and folders, including hidden ones!
March 29th, 2010 4:36pm

I'd say this sounds like one more request for less Explorer / file system "magic" and more deterministic behavior. It would be nice if we could discover a setting that would turn that stupidity off. jQuartly, have you tried doing a listing of files with something like the Gnu tool ls? I wonder if DIR has the magic or if it's really in NTFS. I wonder if this is some kind of quietly implemented "you won't try to hack what you don't know is there security" (note that the word "security" is INSIDE the quotes)... If so, the downside of that kind of hack is utterly unacceptable! Microsoft: Time to share some insight here! Sys admins need to understand what's going on. -Noel
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March 29th, 2010 6:07pm

Hi, I briefly read through this but is sounds similar to an issue I had, see if this helps. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winservergen/thread/7d0eef9a-8531-4ab4-9608-acdb4560e633
April 6th, 2010 7:53pm

I'd say this sounds like one more request for less Explorer / file system "magic" and more deterministic behavior. It would be nice if we could discover a setting that would turn that stupidity off. jQuartly, have you tried doing a listing of files with something like the Gnu tool ls ? I wonder if DIR has the magic or if it's really in NTFS. I wonder if this is some kind of quietly implemented "you won't try to hack what you don't know is there security" (note that the word "security" is INSIDE the quotes)... If so, the downside of that kind of hack is utterly unacceptable! Microsoft: Time to share some insight here! Sys admins need to understand what's going on. -Noel Noel, thanks for the suggestion. I fired up a GNU Debian Linux box and mounted \\192.168.0.20\c$\Users. the output of running ls on this directory shows: total 29 dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2010-03-29 21:22 . drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24576 2010-04-16 08:35 .. drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2010-03-25 12:36 Administrator drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2009-07-14 05:53 All Users drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2010-03-27 22:54 David dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2010-04-07 08:30 davidtew.UKOFFICE dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2009-07-14 08:18 Default drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2009-07-14 05:53 Default User -rwxrwSrwx 1 root root 174 2009-07-14 05:41 desktop.ini dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2009-07-14 08:48 Public i'm not sure if this quite what you were asking, but it appears the directory shows for a linux client here, just like it does for a Win XP client - must be something that Win 7 clients are doing.. Still at a complete loss for an explanation to the kind of funny magic going on here.
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April 19th, 2010 4:13pm

That was useful, in that you have doubly confirmed that the server is providing the information. It's interesting the username is appended with the domain name in that case. I was really hoping you might be able to run the ls command from the Gnu Toolkit on your Windows 7 system - i.e., on the very same machine that is NOT showing the folders with the native DIR command. What I'm hoping to learn is whether the "magic" hiding of the folders you're seeing is in the file system or in the DIR command itself. I really hope it's the latter, because if they're actually tweaking the file system to lie to the programs using it then Windows is doomed. There are places you can download Windows builds of the individual Gnu tools online, though my very quick search didn't turn up a good place. Here is a copy of the one I have installed, from the SourceForge site: Click here to download -Noel
April 19th, 2010 4:38pm

Heh I had a feeling you might say that, unfortunatly it's the MD's laptop, so getting direct access to it is difficult. If i do get direct access to it, i'll fire up a live cd and mount the drive or use http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm and do an ls on it locally and post the results here.... I realise now that we're trying to understand the problem, in the hope that this will give us at least understanding why it exhibits this behaviour, but if anyone does know of a way to control this behaviour then please share :-)
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April 23rd, 2010 2:03pm

Fair enough. I can't help but get the feeling that the "extension" on the directory name (.UKOFFICE) figures into this somehow... Just to be clear, is the user that can't see the "davidtew" folder on the domain named UKOFFICE? -Noel
April 23rd, 2010 2:26pm

Yeah, the username is DavidTew and is a member of the domain UKOFFICE. The user that can't see it is davidtew, I'm also pretty sure when i logged onto the laptop with my domain account (jamesquartly@UKOFFICE), which is also a domain admin, I couldn't see the dir. When I connected from the Linux box I connected from both usernames and got the same result, the file was listed.
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April 23rd, 2010 4:53pm

I don't know how much leeway you have to experiment, but I'd want to see what would happen if you renamed that directory from davidtew.UKOFFICE to just davidtew. I know that local users area folders get names like this, for example if you install a second OS over a first one and use the same username again. Maybe this is a related issue? -Noel
April 23rd, 2010 7:52pm

Workstation - Windows 7 Pro Server: 2003 SBS Situation: We have two new Windows 7 machines at this client site. Both users are using folder redirection for thier My Documents folder. They are redirecting to \\server\users\%username%, which works great. Apparently, in the past, they were using the \\server\users folder as a mapped drive in which users could access eachother's My Documents folders. Well after the implimentation of Windows 7, the two users on the 7 machines, you can no longer see thier folder in the \\server\users folder. Thier named folders still exist as you can browse to them via unc (\\server\users\username)if you enter the full path in, also if you login as an admin on either Windows 7 station they show up as well, it just doesn't show up when logged in another user or as the user it belongs to. I have checked NTFS permissions and they look fine, in fact the user questioning this has full control of the other user's folder (not my idea). Is there a way I can make the two folders in question show up so they can be browsed by users accessing the \\server\users folder? Thank you, Ryan I have tto ask, what is being the used for the server as this is a server permissions issue. If you are looged with credentials and you want to share them, you need to explicitly allow this if you priviledges are suitable. Vote if answered or helpful, I am running for Office (joke)! IT/Developer, Windows/Linux/Mainframe
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April 24th, 2010 6:01am

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