assign ownership

[Eupher]

We've been gradually implementing roaming profiles and folder redirection in our Win2k3 AD domain. I initially had accepted the default "give users exclusive rights" in the My Documents folder redirection group policy, then changed it so Admins would have rights to the folders also. So we have a mix of folders, some have user-only permission, others have user and admin permission. It's easy enough to take ownership of the user-only folders and reset the permissions so they all match. But I can't seem to re-assign ownership back to the user. The help files say to double-click the "other users and groups" option, but that doesn't appear anywhere on the ownership tab in security settings. What's up?

Ken S.

 

[jrbarnett]

It is not possible to assign ownership of a file or folder to any specific user. Best option is to assign the Take Ownership permission to the user in question at the folder level and get the user to take ownership of it, then have the new permissions filter through to files and folders.

John

 

[technome]

Ran into the same thing; was MS personal on drugs when they defaulted to not allowing administrator rights to the profiles? I just changed ownership to administrators, with the user and administrator having full control after changing the GPO setting.

Even for company owners who want privacy, the default is not a wise choice. On a number of servers I have Executive Softwares "Undelete", which won't allow the administrator to see files for disk maintenance or to restore deleted files. Also I had a desktop folder from the profile, which kept the security settings; since it appeared empty logged on as administrator, I deleted it.. thank goodness for the "Undelete" program

 

[Eupher]

Thank you both for your responses. So why on earth does MS say in this article that you can change ownership to a user or group not listed in the "Change owner to" field? Is this a feature only available in the server software and not on the XP clients? Thanks again...

Ken S.

 

[jrbarnett]

I tried out the technique on my test server and yes, it does work, but I got my information from the MCSA Win2003 70-290 Network environment book - which says that this cannot be done. It is not the only inconsistency between the actual and the official training manuals.
My XP Pro client is out of action at the moment so I can't check that at the moment, but will do when possible.

John

 

[Eupher]

Inconsistencies? Microsoft? Nah, couldn't be! ;-)

Thankg again.

 

[technome]

Sorry, in my last post, I was trying to change ownership on a WK2 advanced server with no success.