Windows Server Digital Signing

Some material is very old and may be incorrect today

© August 2003 Tony Lawrence
Fri Aug 15 10:08:11 GMT 2003

Windows 2000 and XP have a feature called "digital signing":

Technet Article on Digital Signing of SMB packets

, which is apparently turned on if the server is functioning as a domain controller.

Samba and other non-Microsoft SMB products don't support this yet, though Samba does have it in the 3.0.0 beta: http://us1.samba.org/samba/whatsnew/samba-3.0.0beta3.html.

As you would expect, if this feature is left turned on, you aren't going to be able to browse to that server with Samba, Visionfs or any other SMB product until the product is updated for this ability. You'll get "tree connect failed" and Access denied messages.

If you aren't exposing SMB traffic to the Internet, and aren't trying to protect against malicious users on your own network, turning this off isn't going to hurt anything. As Windows allows you to configure this setting for a specific computer, you can fine tune this to meet your exact needs.

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