Windows 10 Keeps asking for authentication for public samba share

network-sharewindowswindows 10

I know there are a couple of questions about this, those are different situations though and the provided answers do not relate to my problem.

I have a WD My Cloud EX2 NAS with a configured public share, I can access this share from my windows 10 laptop, windows 10 desktop and android phone without issues or authentication.

However, I did a clean windows 10 install of another desktop and the exact same share keeps asking me for authentication now and wont accept any input I give it.

I tried enabling a certain key in the registry (can't remember the key-name) and rebooting, but that didn't help.

Am I missing something? I'm 100% certain the share is still configured properly since I can still access it from my other machines.

EDIT 1: Something I just realized: the other windows 10 machines are Windows 10 Pro, this system is Windows 10 Home, not sure how that would affect this problem, but that's the only difference I can think of.

EDIT 2: I upgraded to Windows 10 Pro and still can't access the public share.

EDIT 3: When I enter \ as the username and leave the password blank it shows me the share contents, however when I reboot the computer it asks me for credentials again, it won't remember them.

EDIT 4: I have Plex installed on the server, when I get the authentication dialog for the samba share it shows the plex server name in the "domain" field. perhaps this influences the authentication protocol?

Best Answer

I don't know how, but when I inserted as username \ and left the password field blank suddenly it accepted the credentials and showed me the share contents.

Maybe it will help someone else who has the same issue.

EDIT: when I originally posted this answer I couldn't check the checkbox to remember the credentials, causing me to have to do this on every boot. However, this time it did allow me to check the checkbox, I don't know what changed, but it's working now. might have been a windows update.

Another Edit: Upon every boot I now have to use smbpasswd to re-configure the correct password for the account.

Final Edit: It seems this question is getting a lot of attention, I think I should add that after all this time, I managed to solve the issue.

This is related to 2 possible reasons:

  1. A complete factory-reset
  2. leaving the username as "admin", I can't recall exactly what or why, but changing it to my custom username resulted in issues, whereas leaving it as "admin" worked perfectly fine. Possibly something hardcoded in the NAS firmware.
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