Wednesday 5 August 2020

Accessing Samba 4.11 shares from old clients, e.g. XP, Android apps, media players, etc

NB: Please do not do this if you are running a work network, as SMB1 has insecure authentication, and traffic is in clear. Get your clients updated. I did this only because I run Samba on a home network serving only a few of my applications, and only for legacy clients.

When I upgraded my Linux distro I discovered that starting with Samba 4.11 the minimum protocol support level has been raised to SMB2 by default. This made the shares I export inaccessible to an XP virtual machine driving a scanner and a chip programmer, and also an app on my Android tablet.

There are lots of confusing posts on the Internet some about older versions. This relates to these changes. You can still enable SMB1 support, using these lines in smb.conf:
min protocol = NT1
ntlm auth = Yes
Restart nmb and smb and the changes should take effect.

SMB1 support may be removed in future, so hopefully my applications will be also updated before then.