WindowsXP plaintext passwords on LAN

  • Thread starter Thread starter larry
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larry

Our office LAN has an SCO Unix (Openserver 5) box running VisionFS, their
smb server. We have a Windows NT4 box and a Windows 98 box that can access
the Unix box. Because of encryption compatibility problems, both of those
are configured to use plain text passwords. After learning how to change the
registry by hand I discovered that the Win98 disk even has some utilities to
do this.

We recently added a Windows XP Home Edition SP2 box to this mix. It can't
access the VisionFS server. The error message is:
Workgroup:
\\<unix box name> is not accessible. You might not have permission to use
this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out
if you have access permission.

The account is not authorized to log in from this station.

I suspect that the problem can be corrected by having the XP box send
plaintext passwords but I don't know enough about XP to know where to find
this setting. And I ain't touching the registry until I know what I'm doing.
I'm not assuming the entries would be the same as for 98 or NT.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Larry

ps. Is there a difference between the news.microsoft.com and the
msnews.microsoft.com news servers?
 
larry said:
Our office LAN has an SCO Unix (Openserver 5) box running VisionFS,
their
smb server. We have a Windows NT4 box and a Windows 98 box that can
access the Unix box. Because of encryption compatibility problems,
both of those are configured to use plain text passwords. After
learning how to change the registry by hand I discovered that the
Win98 disk even has some utilities to do this.

We recently added a Windows XP Home Edition SP2 box to this mix. It
can't access the VisionFS server. The error message is:
Workgroup:
\\<unix box name> is not accessible. You might not have permission to
use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to
find out if you have access permission.

The account is not authorized to log in from this station.

I suspect that the problem can be corrected by having the XP box send
plaintext passwords but I don't know enough about XP to know where to
find this setting. And I ain't touching the registry until I know what
I'm doing. I'm not assuming the entries would be the same as for 98 or
NT.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Larry

ps. Is there a difference between the news.microsoft.com and the
msnews.microsoft.com news servers?
Click to expand...

Someone who is more familiar with that particular program may have a
better answer for you, but I believe the problem isn't with the
password encryption (or not completely anyway) but rather with the fact
that XP Home authenticates as Guest and Guest is disabled by default in
most *nix and Samba setups.

Check with SCO tech support for how best to handle this if you don't
have a Unix wizard on staff.

Malke
 
Malke said:
Someone who is more familiar with that particular program may have a
better answer for you, but I believe the problem isn't with the
password encryption (or not completely anyway) but rather with the fact
that XP Home authenticates as Guest and Guest is disabled by default in
most *nix and Samba setups.

Check with SCO tech support for how best to handle this if you don't
have a Unix wizard on staff.

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
Click to expand...

VisionFS has some shares configured for Guest. In particluar, the printer is
owned by the nix box and should have guest access. Does XP try to be Guest
even if a user account has been setup, with or without passwords as I've
tried it both ways?

I'm supposed to be the Unix wizard here though we're moving to Linux
shortly. Then I'll have to solve the same problems for Samba.

Thanks for you help.
 
See http://help.isu.edu/disppage.php?doc_id=691&cat_id=26 to enable plain
text passwords in XP Home.

--
Doug Knox, MS-MVP Windows Media Center\Windows Powered Smart
Display\Security
Win 95/98/Me/XP Tweaks and Fixes
http://www.dougknox.com
--------------------------------
Per user Group Policy Restrictions for XP Home and XP Pro
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_securityconsole.htm
--------------------------------
Please reply only to the newsgroup so all may benefit.
Unsolicited e-mail is not answered

Thanks. That seemed to do the trick. Silly me, I was looking at the
microsoft site for answers.

Larry
 
Doug said:
That article was just one of the first Google hits that came up.
Searching for "plain text passwords" at www.microsoft.com returns this as
the third item in the search results.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;244627
Click to expand...

I probably saw that article. It's for Windows 2000. I wouldn't assume that
any of it applies to XP, though I saw a similar article for XP Pro. I tried
to find the Security Settings in the Administrative Tools but couldn't find
them in Home Edition.

I also found articles for Win98, and Win95, but not XP Home.

I found somethings with Google but nothing as good as you pointed me to.
Thanks.

Larry
 
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