Friday January 2
 
16:10
 
Vista And Samba

I’m a big fan of NAS. When my laptop was stolen last year, it was thanks to all my files being on NAS that I could be sure that nothing sensitive was left on the HDD.

After switching to Vista, I found that I couldn’t access one of my NAS drives from within Vista. Even though I gave the correct username and password, I always got this error:

System error 86 has occurred. The specified network password is not correct.

Turns out this is a SMB (samba) negotiation “issue” with Vista. The solution is different depending on the version of Vista being used.

For Home Premium, use regedit to edit the registry for the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel

Change the default of 0×3 (NTLMv2 only) to 0×1 (use NTLMv2 if available, or older versions if not) and reboot.

For Ultimate, run (Windows key + R) secpol.msc and go to “Local Policies > Security Options”. Find “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” and change the setting from “Send NTLMv2 response only” to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”.

NAS can be difficult or impossible to firmware update – I certainly don’t want to firmware update my Netorage since it has been running flawlessly for 3+ years and I’m no longer in Korea (when I bought it). Still at least the settings above work! I could never get MacOS X to read the Korean character set of my NAS.