SMB Frustration

[Unrayed]

Hi folks, 

 

I (like many in the past) am having issues with Unraid SMB shares on a Windows 10 client machine. The basic setup of my Unraid shares is they are ALL Secure, with the exception of a single Private share, and a single Public share. The issues I'm having only began after I re-installed Windows on my client machine, & before that, everything worked as it should.

 

The issue is basically when I clean boot Windows (and indeed a clean boot of the Unraid Server itself)....I can't gain access to ANY of my shares. I'll get the dreaded "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one username, are not allowed" error that I've seen mentioned on the forums many times. It's confusing because these are CLEAN boots we're talking about here, there are no other connections happening. I've confirmed this by running "net use * /delete" in the command prompt, which results in "There are no entries in the list", confirming that nothing else from the client machine is accessing Unraid. 

 

I originally had an Unraid user defined, e.g. john with a password of say 1234. Along with other Unraid users too...who had no issue accessing their defined shares with their assigned passwords. Once I reformatted the OS drive on the client PC though, and reinstalled Windows, that all went down the toilet. I wasn't able to access ANY share, despite using the credentials defined for a given Unraid user. So I read that if I change the Unraid user to match that of my Windows sign it, this resolves the issue....which it didn't. I've an MS account which is tied to my Windows, so had no username as such. It's based on an email address. So I tried setting up an Unraid user, e.g. johndoe (if MS accoutn was [email protected] for example), and matched the password with the Windows pin sign-in, e.g. 12345678. Same result, no access to shares.

 

I've checked the credential manager, and there's nothing there saved that's relevant to Unraid. There's a few entries set up, MS account, OneDrive, XboxLive, and some others MS has setup as default....but nothing there that is relevant to Unraid.

 

The 'solution' to the problem, has been to manually create an entry in the Credential Manager...the details of which are the name of the Unraid Server itself, then the username is Tower\john, and password put in. This gives me instant access to all the shares that 'john' has been given access too. So it's sort of solved, but not quite. If anyone else were to use this Windows session, they have no way to input their own credentials to access their own shares (I could set up multiple Windows profiles I suppose, but it'd be great if I didn't have to)...and secondly, more importantly, 'john' has instant access to those shares without having to use ANY credentials (given their now stored in the credential manager)...I'm quite concerned about malware like Ransomware having instant access to those shares any potentially encrypting any relevant content on said shares.

 

Is there no way I can just be prompted with a user/password box, and for it to just work like it did before?

 

I've had a good read of this thread - 

 

Edited August 23, 2020 by Unrayed

[JonathanM]

The single public share is probably causing windows to see a successful login with default credentials, which then precludes being asked for updated credentials, because windows is stupid.

 

Try setting the public share to private and see how it goes.

[Unrayed]

On 8/23/2020 at 4:52 PM, jonathanm said:

The single public share is probably causing windows to see a successful login with default credentials, which then precludes being asked for updated credentials, because windows is stupid.

 

Try setting the public share to private and see how it goes.

Thanks for the reply jonathanm. That makes a lot of sense, because it seems that Windows is connecting to the Server on boot for no apparent reason. So I was all set to test your theory out there this morning....and wanted to just ensure the problem was still present before I started. It wasn't. I'd normal access to my shares for some reason, the problem was gone.

 

I racked my brains trying to figure out what the hell had changed that could have fixed the problem. Then the light in my head went on. Yesterday evening, I had used the "clear file explorer history" feature in Windows Explorer as the left hand pane of my explorer had gotten cluttered up. Within the history prior to clearing it, must have been my public share? I'm wondering now with that list cleared, is Windows behaving by not trying to connect on boot to any paths in that list?