OT: Allowing Administrative Access to a Remote Computer (Windows XP Pro SP3)

Try this.

Ok--sorry about being wise@$$ about it!

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the reply. There is no internet involved.... The computers are sitting next to each other and networked with a gigabit switch on a closed network. I mean "remote" in the sense that I want to be able to log on to the Workstation from the Server to perform a backup of the Workstation system drive onto the Server using Acronis TrueImage Management Console (on the Server) and TrueImage Agent (on the Workstation).

No internet connection, and all firewalls are off. There is also no antivirus/antispyware installed. It's a completely secure closed net.

The network is performing perfectly, so it's not a network issue. I need to be able to log on to the Workstation using my Server Windows user account.

Cheers!

I'm no expert in that area, or any other, but you have to find out what "address"-name acronys on your server wants and what to call your workstation for acronys. If you are using the windows workgroup feature, it will want what windows wants. I would contact Acronys to help you find the exact code or wording. Are you doing this through Acronis or windows?
Adding a "user" account will not give you an "administrator" level of authrity. ??? Do you want the work station to be the administrator of the server?
You need I think to think of this setup as.. excuse the term... slaving one computer to the other which leads to some more issues. What's thwe server doing and what's the work stationn doing. ??? Hopefully some more expert users will clarify the situation for you if you provide some info on what you are trieing to do.

If you create an account on the workstation called "backupadmin" or whatever, make it an administrator, set a password, you should be able to connect to that machine (and it's shares or even the \\machinename\c$ hidden administrative share of the whole workstation c: drive).

If you are aksed for credentials, use machinename\backupadmin and the password set above. Give that a shot and see if you can't select and backup files from the server side. If not, you could get the robocopy utility (free from Microsoft) and run a nightly task that does a copy of files over to the server as a scheduled task and then the server can do whatever else with that data as a local copy getting backed up to some other place, like external USB HD or whatever.

Does that help?

I'm a bit confused on what you are trying to do. Are you wishing to control "Workstation" from "Server" or are you trying to access files on "Workstation" from "Server"? There's a big difference.

To control one from the other you'll need to install a VNC server on the machine you wish to control and then install a VNC Client/viewer on the machine you wish to control from. There's plenty of good free software out to do that, and it's all relatively simple to set up although you may have to configure your firewall, my commiserations if you've got Norton installed.

If you are trying to access files on one machine from another then you need to set the correct permissions to allow that to happen. Most permissions for simple networking can be set via the "Sharing" tab on the properties pages (I'm working from memory so it may be slightly different). Again you may have to do a little firewall configuring. The best way to set up such networking is get it working with the firewall off and then turn the firewall back on and configure it as required. If I had a £ for every hour I've wasted trying to configure networks only to discover a firewall on the network is on somewhere and causing all the problems, I could quite comfortably retire. If you want to get a bit more complicated then you need to set some of the more advanced permissions available via XP Pro. In fact those permission setting options are the main difference between Pro and Home. More info please.