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I have a SMB share on a Linux host. To grant remote access to the share for a Windows user, one must create a new SMB user which has the same username, and same password as the Windows account.

i.e. to give access to Windows user winhost\calvin I would run smbpasswd -a calvin, and use the same password that winhost\calvin uses. Then I would update smb.conf to something like

[myshare] path = /home/lincoln/myshare valid users = lincoln, calvin read only = no 

Once this is in place, calvin can now see the share from Windows via UNC path \\<ip addr>\myshare

This works fine for named user accounts, but I can't figure out how to grant access to a Windows "local system" account, i.e. a machine account.

I have tried creating SMB users with names like WINHOST and WINHOST$ with a blank password (local system accounts don't have passwords), but this doesn't seem to work.

When I try to access the share using the system account (via dir \\<ip addr>\myshare) I get the error "The specified server cannot perform the requested operation".

What are the details of the SMB account and config that can make this happen?

I do not want to make the share public - this seems to be the only workaround I can find so far.

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  • what are you trying to do? I'm guessing you want to access the share using a scheduled task; if that is the case, you can easily write script and map the share under another security context Commented Jul 17, 2016 at 6:43

1 Answer 1

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When not using a domain, the LocalSystem account can access network resources only with anonymous credential. In other words, it will not present named credential to the remote samba server.

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  • I see - so it is not possible to assign a SMB username or password that maps to a localsystem account. Thus making the share public is the only way to allow access. Commented Jul 17, 2016 at 23:17

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