Remote Administration For Windows - Windows administration tricks and tips.: 01/13/06

How to enable file and printer sharing on XP SP2

If you haven't figured out by now, we sell remote control software for windows. The cool part about it is that you do not even need to go to the remote computer and install an agent to control it.

When Microsoft released Service Pack 2, we noticed more and more trial users complaining that they could not connect to their Windows XP machines. We couldn't figure it out. We had tested with XP SP2 and it worked fine for us. The trick was that Microsoft had created different settings for users that were not part of a domain.

Effectively file and printer sharing are disabled when XP SP2 comes out of the box - this broke our automatic install feature since IntelliAdmin could not connect to the $admin share.

After scouring the internet we found how to re-enable file and printer sharing for your stand alone XP SP2 machine - and it is secure.

Here are the step by step instructions for turning it back on:

1. Open the control panel. You will find this by clicking on start, then settings, and then control panel. Click on the icon that says "Network and Internet Connections"

2. Once you are in there. Click on the icon that says "Network Connections"

3. Now you will find your network cards listed here. You will need to right click on the card you want to enable file sharing. Select the properties menu

4. Go to the advanced tab, and click on settings

5. Go to the exceptions menu and make sure file and printer sharing is checked.

6. Click OK, and in the "Network Connections" Folder click on the tools menu, and select "Folder Options..."

7. Go to the view tab. Scroll down and make sure "Use simple file sharing" is unchecked.

8. Click OK. Sharing is now on, but if you have not set a password for your username you still will not be able to share - Once you do this you will now be able to share printers and files again.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Friday, January 13, 2006

For a long time now we have used DNS CNAME for our servers. CNAME stands for canonical name. It is an alias for another host name. In our case we have two servers. Their names have been changed to protect the innocent. Lets say they are called iserver1, and iserver2. We constantly replicate all of our data from iserver1 to iserver2.

We have created a CNAME and call it fileserver. This CNAME points right now to iserver1. All the users on our network share to \\fileserver\sharename. Now if something bad were to happen to iserver1 we could change the CNAME to iserver2 and within minutes we would be back and running again. This is what you would call a poor mans backup system – call it what you want, but it has saved us a tremendous amount of time on two different occasions.

Both of our servers have been humming along fine for a while now – and we decide it is finally time to upgrade 2003 to SP1. After the upgrade we could not share to \\fileserver. Now if we try to connect to the actual server name it works fine.

We suspected right away that SP1 must have some type of security enhancement that has disabled our CNAME trick. After a few hours of searching we finally found the registry key in question:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters

If we create a DWORD value under this key named:

DisableStrictNameChecking

And set it to ‘1’ – our CNAME works again!

Now we thought we might be making something insecure by doing this, but Microsoft KB article 281308 seems to indicate that this is a bug.

For those of you who do not want to dive into the registry, we have written a simple app that will change this setting for you.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Friday, January 13, 2006

Enable file and printer sharing on XP SP2

CNAME Sharing disabled in Windows 2003 SP1