Access USB memory stick from remote computer on the network

[hsingh]

Hi Guys and Gals,

 

Ive got a really weird one for you. The other day I was watching a student play GTA via AB Tutor control. I could see that he was running it from a memory stick. So naturally I thought I'd just delete it from his memory stick. However, when I tried accessing the stick from my machine I couldn't. I just got the error of the drive cannot be found. I tried all the different possible drive letters it could be to no avail. I was doing this by entering in the following in explorer

 

\\pcname\driveletter$ - as you normally would.

 

I then thought id try a memory stick of my own on a totally different pc and guess what, its doesn't work there either. I then left my machine and tried accessing it from the domain controller, Nothing. Its got me a bit baffled. I'm sure I could do this before.

 

Any ideas?

[FN-GM]

No you can't do it for removable storage. You can do it for external hard drive though.

[3s-gtech]

Not sure this has ever worked - removable disks and optical drives don't get an administrative share. Floppy disks do though! You may be able to install something on clients which gives this ability. It's annoying though, as it'd be nice to catch some software on sticks - I think it's safer to use Software Restriction Policies tbh. If you accidentally delete their work on the stick, it'll take some explaining!

[hsingh]

Oh great, now im going nuts too with amnesia. How would I go about using software restriction policies?

[Achandler]

Block *.exe from being run on removable devices.

 

To be honest we block *.exe from pretty much anywhere.

[hsingh]

cheers, i'll give that a go

[hsingh]

Ive just had a quick look on google and a lot of the posts seem to suggest that it only blocks the root of the removable storage and not the subdirectories. Is this true from what you have seen?

[sted]

could you remotely issue a command to the pc in question to "mount" f: (say) as c:\naughty then delete files from c$ share?

 

or possibly simpler create a scheduled task to delete it

 

powershell can be run on anotehr pc i think as well

[Achandler]

I guess it depends how you setup your restrictions. We set up ours, so it is blocked unless there is an exception.

 

So our default security level for students is disallowed. Then we have exceptions for everywhere, please bear in mind you need to specify subfolders using this method for example we have both below unblocked:

 

%PROGRAMFILES%\*\*

%PROGRAMFILES%\*\*\*

[bwestlake]

put a script on his user profile that copys things from a removable device to a share then block it in software restriction