Windows 2008 Server (and Windows 7 for that matter) has had a bit of a facelift when it comes to SMB and overall File & Printer Sharing in newer Microsoft Operating Systems. They have called this update SMB2 and if you read around you can see there’s some real advantages to it. The main one being performance and ‘chatter’ across your network..
While this is great for Windows 7 and above if you are using something like 2000/XP/Windows 2003 server to connect to 2008 shares you could receive the dreaded:
the specified network name is no longer available
even though you can ping the 2008 Server hosting the file shares and from a DNS point of view everything is looking normal but you simply can’t connect to file shares.
It seems that some SMB1 operating systems are unable to connect properly due to the introduction of SMB2 in Windows 2008. The easiest solution is to disable SMB2 via the Registry:
- Log into the Windows 2008 Server and load up Registry Editor (Start > Run > regedit)
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
- Create a new DWORD (32-Bit where applicable) called SMB2 with a setting of 0 to disable or 1 to enable again.
- Reboot the server for this setting to take effect
I enabled this setting on one of our Windows 2008 servers which was exhibiting this issue and after a reboot we were able to connect successfully again.
Happy Ninja-ring!