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Administrative Share

If enabled, sets a share as an administrative share. Administrative shares are special hidden network shares like as C$, D$, etc and usually in Windows it represents a disk volume available on the host server.

Apart from ‘administrative’, an administrative share accepts only the following share options:

  • ‘netname’ – Refer to section Netname. The ‘netname’ option for an administrative share MUST use the syntax, [A-Z]$, i.e. one letter from the English alphabet as a drive letter followed by a ’ $ ’ sign. For e.g., C$, Z$, etc.
  • ‘path’ – Refer to section Path
  • ‘remark’ – Refer to section Remark

All other share options are ignored for an administrative share.

Example of an administrative share configuration:

[share]
netname = C$
remark = Sample administrative share
path = /mnt/cvolume
administrative = true
[/share]

In Fusion, administrative shares have a special function which allows these shares to be used as a drive root directory for creating other disk shares by using the drive letter of the administrative share as a prefix. The following example shows how a share can be created for a path ‘/mnt/cvolume/share-1’ using an administrative share with ‘netname = C$’ as a drive root directory:

[share]
netname = SHARE-1
remark = Sample share using administrative share as drive root
path = C:/share-1
permission = everyone:full
[/share]

This also provides a way for administrators to restrict directories that can be used for creating new shares using the Shared Folders snap-in of Microsoft Management Console or other such DCE/RPC based tools. In order to use administrative shares as a drive root directory for other shares, it’s mandatory to preconfigure these administrative shares either using the dynamic configuration utility, ‘tsmb-cfg’ or by adding the necessary administrative share sections directly to the configuration file.

Default:

administrative = false