User mode and Microsoft Domain Permissions

Submitted by Steven Brodson on August 6, 2007 - 6:28pm.

Hi:

I have been playing with Moka5 on a USB 2.0-attached hard drive. My ultimate objective is to have a personal portable environment that I can attach to my work laptop (or my desktop at home), without exposing any of the data to the work system (e.g. leaving traces on the hard drive, etc.). I like the user-mode feature as it makes transferring files between environments much easier and keeps my personal files in a regular ntfs folder (rather than contained in a "virtual disk" that would have to be mounted through VMWare.

The problem that I am having is that Moka5 accesses this drive through the windows share system and therefore is subject to Windows permissions. Accordingly, when I build my Moka5 environment on my personal desktop (workgroup member), it works great, but if I then connect it to my laptop (on my employers' Windows domain), it has insufficient permissions to connect "My Documents". I am currently trying to rebuild the environment on my work laptop to see if that works and then can be connected to my workgroup machine. However, even if this works, what if I try to connect to another domain-attached host?

I know that VMWare does allow you to map a drive to a "raw" partition. However, I cannot see any way to do this within Moka5.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Steve Brodson

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Update

Submitted by Steven Brodson on August 6, 2007 - 6:56pm.

I have reinstalled Moka5 starting on the work laptop and am still getting an issue. Notably, I am using NAT networking. I log in and the virtual machine hangs for a few minutes. Then, I get a pop-up box that reads:

"Failed to connect to host files: WNetAddConnection2W: Not enough server storage is available to process this command.

When you press OK, then login will continue but My Documents may be unavailable."

Please help!

Thanks.

Steve Brodson

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Potential explanation and workaround

Submitted by Constantine Sap... on August 7, 2007 - 9:40am.

Steve,

Thank you for using moka5 and sorry for the problems that you're having.

Is your work computer redirecting My Documents to a network share? You can check by right clicking on my Documents, selecting Properties, and seeing if Target looks like a network share. If that is the case, then the user files implementation will not work. We are working to fix this limitation.

In the meanwhile, if you are using our latest release bundled with VMware Player 2.0, you may be able to access your files using the VMware Shared Folders mechanism. To do this, go to the VMware Player menu and click Shared Folders... Select Always Enabled.

If your LivePC has VMware guest tools installed, you should be able to see the equivalent of My Documents at \\.host\Shared Folders\Private.

Again, sorry for the trouble and please let us know how things wokr out.

Best,
-Costa

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VMWare Shared Folders

Submitted by Steven Brodson on August 19, 2007 - 7:14am.

Ah... I understand... I guess that VMWare maps folders this way as a security mechanism. Without Share security, it breaks the Virtual Machine model to permit direct connections.

I have tried the Shared Folders mechanism you suggest (I have VMWare Tools and Player 2.0 installed), but have not yet gotten it to work... I'll post another update when I have time.

Thanks.

Steve Brodson

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