Vista and Samba

Mandatory Shouting

Well ... nice trick of MS again to try and be incompatible with the rest of the world.

What's the problem?

You have a new pc (or already an old one) with Windows Vista on it and you are not able to connect to Samba drives, either by windows explorer or by the 'net use' command. A typical symptom you will notice on protected drives is the fact that the username/password combination is never accepted.

If you have Windows Vista Home you will not be able to connect to Samba Shared drives. Nice ... hmmm ... Just Microsoft alike.

How to solve it?

After looking around the internet some solutions are available but most of them seem not to be valid work arounds.

1. Upgrade Vista to a "Professional" level
The Vista standard installed on most private customers' pc's is a basic version from which MS has seen it appropriate to remove some tools from the more professional versions which you need to solve these kinds of problems.

An upgrade costs ... 100 € at least ... so ... to me not valid.

In case you have the more expensive version you should use a program which lets you handle the local securi!ty policies on Windows Vista: secpol.msc. This is missing from the Vista Home versions.

2. Go to a an OS which is worthwhile and not purely commercially oriented.

The solution can be reduced to a choice for the best distribution for your particullar situation.

Ubuntu linux has some flavors for any kind of objective ...

This is a challange too ... but it will work out fine unless MS-depending programs need to be run, which would be a strategic error since everything is moving to open-internet technology.

3. Change a registry value ...

Found this on the following link : http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-network/670498.htm and is valid for the Vista Home distribution

In short:

• go to the registry (windows-R type regedit and press the run button)
  
• select in the left pane registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/LSA
  
• Select in the right pane the value LmCompatibilityLevel (the value will be 3, stored in hex)
  
• Doubleclick on the LmCompatibilyLevel item, a box with the value will apear.
  
• change the value to 2 (some say 1) I set it to 2 and this seemed to work (maybe this depends on the version of Samba your target is running)
  
• press the OK button
  
• exit the registry editor
  
• Some say a reboot is required some don't. Quess the best thing to do is reboot.
  
• Then try connecting by the command "Net use" from the command line or by mapping the network drive in windows explorer.
  
• This should have solved it.

The fact is that MS is considering that a certain security protocol is in place for all external sources ... which seems not to be the case. This is where the '3' comes from. (see also http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html )

Hope this did the trick for you.