How to fix windows premissions for torrented files

June 17, 2008 4:10 PM

Torrented files can't be read by a remote machine until they are cut/pasted. Why, and how to fix it?

I have 2 computers, one of which downloads torrents. The completed directories can be seen by the other computer, but clicking on them gets an 'access denied' error. Moving the directory somewhere else, then moving it back where it was causes the error to go away. This happens long after the file is done & the torrent stopped.

What could be causing this? I use uTorrent, in case it matters. The torrents are downloads of movies I already own on VHS from various trackers. Both machines are windows XP boxes, in the same workgroup. Both users have admin rights on their respective machines, and the share allows all users full access. No users are set to 'deny'.

posted by Four Flavors to computers & internet (2 comments total)

I had a similar problem to this once....turns out that the bittorrent part of it was really just a symptom of a bigger problem.

Are you always able to copy other folders from one computer to the other when you aren't dealing with bittorrent?

Check this site (Internet Explorer only unfortunately)...go through every step...especially where it talks about the RestrictAnonymous registry value. Check that reg value on both computers...restart them, and try again.
posted by AltReality at 4:26 PM on June 17

The share may well allow all users full access, but I bet the underlying NTFS permissions don't. Welcome to the worm can.

Windows file sharing was invented before NTFS. It was the first access control mechanism of any sort available in Windows, and because Windows is heroically backward compatible, it's still there.

Turning on Full Control for Everyone permissions on a share does not grant unrestricted access to the files inside the folder being shared. All it does is stop the network sharing mechanism imposing its own access restrictions in addition to those imposed by the underlying NTFS file system.

Personally, I prefer to turn on Full Control for Everyone access on every share I set up, and use the access controls built into the underlying NTFS file system to control who can do what to which. The NTFS permissions are much more fine-grained and easier to deal with, and I hate having to mess with permissions in two different places.

It sounds to me like you've lucked on a method for getting the NTFS permissions set as you need them by using side-effects determined by the somewhat strange rules for permissions on folders being copied and/or moved. But really, all you should have to do is set the proper NTFS permissions by hand on the folder containing your torrents, and all should be well. You need to grant at least Read permission to that folder, its subfolders and files, for whatever user needs to access them. However, figuring out exactly what user that is can be tricky.

If you're using Windows XP Home or XP Pro with Simple File Sharing turned on, then the Guest account is used for all network sharing. The Guest account exists by default on every Windows installation, whether it's enabled for logon or not. So if you're using SFS, all you need to do is make sure Guest can get to the folder you're sharing and things will start working.

Unfortunately, turning on SFS suppresses the Security tab for files and folders, which is the easiest thing to use for setting these kinds of permissions. You can get it back by temporarily turning SFS off again (or using this patch, if you're on XP Home) but The Right Thing, according to Microsoft, is to leave SFS on, and make sure the folder you're sharing is a subfolder of Shared Documents, which has the appropriate permissions set by default.

If SFS is turned off, then the default credentials supplied to the sharing server are the client's current username and password. Access will not be granted if there is no user account for that username on the server. The simplest thing, in this scenario, is to make sure every user account on the client is matched by one with the same username and password on the server.

Note that using the XP GUI to rename your user accounts is not sufficient for this. The GUI rename operation changes only the account's display name, not its username.

If this advice isn't specific enough, post back with a more detailed description of your existing file sharing arrangements and I'll help you work out exactly what to do.
posted by flabdablet at 10:16 PM on June 17