MBWE and Windows 7/Vista Ownership/Permissions/Recycle Bin

Variety of issues that seem to be related

Scenario:

MBWE 1TB with various basic and administrative users (named SERVERB on the network)

Home network with various 7 and Vista PCs, one workgroup, all basic users have same user name and password as set up on the MBWE

Old XP laptop that had been setup up to be a server that I want to toss (named SERVERA on the network)

What I am trying to do:

Have each basic family user moving between PCs but always have access to the same My Documents/Favorites/etc. wherever they log in. I did this before without trouble on the XP laptop. But, it is getting old, has limited HDD space and sometimes shuts down, etc. So, I want to transfer all of the storage functionality to the MBWE.

What I have found is a lot of access permission problems and strange behavior of the Recycle Bin.

  1. Created folder shares for each user on the MWBE with each particular user and the administrator group having full access rights. Under windows there are permission user names for Everyone, Unix user root and Unix group jewab. Owner is root.

  2. From admin user (named sysadmin), created Documents and Favorites folder. And in Documents folder, created Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. (emulating the Windows user structure). Under windows, the folders appear with permission user names for Everyone, Unix group jewab and Linux user SERVERB\sysadmin. Owner is SERVERB\sysadmin.

  3. From sysadmin user, I copied all files from SERVERA to SERVERB including subfolders, etc. The transferred files all have the same permissions and ownership as the Documents and Favorites folders. All inheritance possibilities seem to be unchecked.

  4. Now, I log on to Windows as the user (let’s call it kid1) and go to My Documents, Favorites, etc, right click, properties, location, change to [\SERVERB\kid1\Documents](file://%5C%5CSERVERB%5Ckid1%5CDocuments), etc. (from the same string with [\SERVERA](file://%5C%5CSERVERA) before).

  5. Stuff stops working as expected…

A. A folder called $RECYCLE.BIN gets created automatically. After checking a few google search results, it seems that Recycle Bin is not supported well on network disks, so I right click the desktop Recycle bin and find the Documents folder as a separate item from C: and set the option for remove files immediately (generally OK for my family…)

B. kid1 has no problem opening files and creating new ones, but cannot modify or delete files that were transferred (access permission for user SERVERB\sysadmin required).

C. Strangely, even files that I create as kid1 and show owner as kid1 cannot be modified or deleted after they are first created (access permission for user SERVERB\kid1 required). But $RECYCLE.BIN with same owner and permissions can be deleted (but keeps coming back). However when logged in as sysadmin, modify/delete works smoothly on both sysadmin owned files and kid1 owned files.

So, seeking advice for Win7 and Vista on how to get this setup…

  1. Preferably, would like to be able to set permission rights with inheritability

  2. Preferably, would like to be able to setup offline folder availability

  3. Preferably, would like to avoid mapping with a drive letter (although I don’t see how this would change things anyway).

Can anyone point me at a good online resource for understanding all of this and getting to the bottom of why user permissions on SERVERB don’t match with apparent user permissions from Win 7 and Vista? Also, how can the ownership of the transferred files be changed from sysadmin back to kid1?

Seems silly that I would have to buy a full Windows PC in order to set up user data on a server. I like the NAS approach because it is cheap, expandible, presumably not likely to be obsoleted (once the initial setup is figured out), can be backed up easily and moved around easily, etc.

Look forward to your feedback!