- May 19, 2011
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This is one of those situations that I already found a solution for, but I don't understand how it can even be a problem in the first place.
Local network, every PC is connected via ethernet. One PC is a Win10 Pro box and acts as the file server on the network. PCs don't need to authenticate in order to connect (the "password protected sharing" option is set to off). The client in question is a Win11 Pro (24H2 I believe) PC.
I'm going to be making some changes to the network and I wanted to test something out, so on the Win11 box I created a test user. The main user can connect to the 'server' absolutely fine, but when the test user connected, I got the error:
"Windows cannot access \\server.
Blah blah blah generic message here.
More info:
Error code 0x8007804f8
You can't access this shared folder because your organisation's security policies block unauthenticated guest access."
There aren't any group policies in place on this network. My understanding was that any settings that affect file shares, particularly authentication, were machine-wide not per-user.
The solution I ended up using was a registry key: HKLM > SYS > CurrentControlSet > Services > Lanmanworkstation > Parameters > AllowInSecureGuestAuth:1
It's a system wide setting. If I toggled this setting, the test user was affected by it. The main user carried on working regardless.
It was at this point in writing this post that I realised the likely reason for why the main user wasn't affected by this problem: I bet that the main user and the main user on the server are coincidentally using the same credentials to log in, but if that's the case, why on earth didn't the test user throw up an authentication window?
Admittedly something I've never fully understood about Windows filesharing is when a client might choose to authenticate with its own login credentials and when it tries to go for anonymous/guest login details.
Local network, every PC is connected via ethernet. One PC is a Win10 Pro box and acts as the file server on the network. PCs don't need to authenticate in order to connect (the "password protected sharing" option is set to off). The client in question is a Win11 Pro (24H2 I believe) PC.
I'm going to be making some changes to the network and I wanted to test something out, so on the Win11 box I created a test user. The main user can connect to the 'server' absolutely fine, but when the test user connected, I got the error:
"Windows cannot access \\server.
Blah blah blah generic message here.
More info:
Error code 0x8007804f8
You can't access this shared folder because your organisation's security policies block unauthenticated guest access."
There aren't any group policies in place on this network. My understanding was that any settings that affect file shares, particularly authentication, were machine-wide not per-user.
The solution I ended up using was a registry key: HKLM > SYS > CurrentControlSet > Services > Lanmanworkstation > Parameters > AllowInSecureGuestAuth:1
It's a system wide setting. If I toggled this setting, the test user was affected by it. The main user carried on working regardless.
It was at this point in writing this post that I realised the likely reason for why the main user wasn't affected by this problem: I bet that the main user and the main user on the server are coincidentally using the same credentials to log in, but if that's the case, why on earth didn't the test user throw up an authentication window?
Admittedly something I've never fully understood about Windows filesharing is when a client might choose to authenticate with its own login credentials and when it tries to go for anonymous/guest login details.
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