Windows 7 cannot access Smb shares on Infrant ReadyNAS

 

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 upgrading from Vista, which preserved all my settings. Almost. After the first login, Windows 7 popped up balloon warnings that “Could not reconnect all network drives”

It turned out that all the drives I had mapped to Samba shares on the Infrant ReadyNAS system and that were working fine in Vista were now inaccessible, and they were showing as disconnected in Windows Explorer.

Double clicking the shares in Windows Explorer, or attempting to access the server by address \\alinc-nas was displaying a logon prompt. Typing the correct password and pressing OK was useless, the logon dialog came back with a “Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password” error.

 

Attempting to view the shares from command line with “net view” was no better, this one complained “System error 53 has occurred / The network path was not found” or “System error 5 has occurred / Access is denied”

I searched the net and eventually I found the solution. Thanks to Brandon for his article!

The problem can be solved by modifying a security policy, as described below:

- Open the StartMenu and search for “Local Security Policy”. Right click the application icon and choose to RunAsAdministrator. (alternatively you can open the Run dialog and launch “secpol.msc”).

- In the “Local Security Policy” window, expand SecuritySetting/LocalPolicies/SecurityOptions folders in the left pane tree and locate “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level” in the right pane list.

- Double click the line and change its value from the default “Send NTLMv2 response only” into “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”. Click Ok and agree with the warning. You’re done! The shares should now be accessible (there is no need to reboot).