Fix shared folders not working in Windows 11 24H2

Recently, Microsoft started pushing out Windows 11 24H2 to darn near everyone.

Ideally, this is because it’s now stable…

Unfortunately, many users are having problems accessing shared folders on their local network after upgrading to 24H2.

Luckily, once we understand WHY this is happening, it’s pretty easy to fix!

Why network shares stopped working in 24H2

It’s pretty simple: 24H2 now requires that Samba / SMB shared folders on your local network have a username and password. The era of free-for-all wide-open shared folders is over.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

This is part of a campaign to improve the security of Windows and Windows Server for the modern landscape. […]

You’ll recall the Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 campaigns against SMB1 and guest auth fallback.

Most sources on the net tell you to simply re-enable SMB v1, but that’s a bad idea for a number of reasons:

Do not disable SMB signing in Windows or use SMB1 to work around this behavior (SMB1 supports signing but does not enforce it). An SMB device that does not support signing allows interception and relay attacks from malicious parties.

Well, okay then.

Only trouble is, if you’re using Windows network shares and you have a slew of puters, you’ll have to do this:

Create a user/password on Puter #1
Go to every other puter on the network and try to connect to Puter #1’s shared folder
Enter user/pass that you create on Puter #1
Now just repeat Steps 1-3 for every other machine on your network

SUPER-easy, right??

And what’s worse, you probably don’t care about the security of Windows shares on your LOCAL network. Most likely, you have a router acting as a firewall – and it’s not totally useless.

So, while MS would love for you to buy Windows Server and create a domain and go Full Corporate – thereby spending lots of money – you’d rather just stick with “insecure” network shares on your local network. Duh!

How to make shared folders work again in 24H2

No problemo!

First, I’m going to assume that you’re using “standard” NOT-password protected Public folders on your Windows shares, like so:

Alrighty. That gets you almost all the way there…

Note that most likely, you can still access the share just fine if you use the IP addy of the puter instead of the machine name. But that’s kind of messy (especially if the machines on your LAN don’t have static IPs) so we’ll fix it good.

You just need to turn off “signing” of network shares, which was added in 24H2, and ensure that insecure guest logins are allowed. The way to do that is:

Click the Start/Windows button
Type: Powershell
Click: Run as Administrator
Now paste in the following 3 commands:

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableInsecureGuestLogons $true -Force
Set-SmbClientConfiguration -RequireSecuritySignature $false -Force
Set-SmbServerConfiguration -RequireSecuritySignature $false -Force

You might need to reboot, but I didn’t on 3 different puters.

Aaand, you’re done.

What if I STILL can’t access my network shares?

Oh, well, yeah… There seems to be a ‘Little Bug’ in 24H2 that MS knows about, but of course they aren’t fixing it because they don’t want you to do what I just described above.

It appears that if IPv6 is enabled on your network adapter, some windows shares will be broken. If you’re using IPv4 on your LAN (you very likely are), then try disabling IPv6 like so:

Click the Start/Windows button
Type: view network
Click: View network connections
Find your active Ethernet or WiFi connection icon, right-click it, and click Properties
Scroll down until you find Internet Protocol Version 6, and UNcheck the box
Click OK