I’m new to using the My Book and I’m a little bit confused about what the users section of the My Book Live dashboard is. For example, if I give a share access to an account called ‘guest’, what does that user refer to? Is it supposed to be the credentials provided when trying to access that folder through Windows? I just tried typing ‘guest’ as a user name on a test share and I was denied access.
On a MyBookLive (and many, if not all NAS devices) the definitions of user accounts are independent of the accounts on the computers accessing the shares. If you defined an account “Guest” on your MBL you gave that count a password. When you access that share from Windows, you will be prompted for “network credentials”. Those credentials are the userid and password of an account on the MBL that has been given access to the share. Those can be the credentials of any account on the MBL with access to the share.
If the account “Public” has been given access to the share then you don’t need to provide a password. (Note: If you use the Windows command NET USE to map this share to a Windows drive you will have to include a userid and password on the command. These are dummy credentials; they will not be checked so you can use anything, but the command syntax requires them.)
Windows has an odd - and very restrictive - requirement for network credentials: a Windows user may have only one set of network credentials for a given NAS. That means you need to pick an account on your MBL that has access to everything a Windows user will need. That also means that a Windows user cannot access both a public and private share on the same NAS.
A slight circumvention to that restriction: Windows treats the IP address and the DNS name of a NAS as different destinations so a Windows user can have two sets of credentials for a given NAS, but then you need to use a static IP address for the device.
