Having just installed Windows 7, like many people since its release, I ran into a perculier problem. Windows 7 was able to detect that my Apple Time Capsule was serving up its disk and, as a result, was prompting my shiny new Windows 7 box to authenticate for access. I tried using the Airport password…nothing…I tried changing my Time Capsule to use a static password for network disk access…still nothing. It turns out that this solution fixed everything.

Here are the details:

Open the Local Security Policy MMC applet, you can do this by searching for Security in the start menu or from the command prompt by typing:

%windir%system32secpol.msc /s

Once there open the Local Policies folder, then the Security Options view. From there find “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level” – you will probably find this is set to “Send NTLMv2 response only” – change this to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” – this does lower your security level but is pretty much required to work with anything pre-vista.

Further down you should see “Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients” – you may have to make sure that both require boxes there are unchecked as well.

This should get your Time Capsule, Airport Disks, and Pre-Vista SMB/CIFS shares working again!

Though this does lower the security constraints imposed by Windows 7 (for your benefit) it shouldn’t make much of a difference in a mixed, non-domain enabled, environment….plus no reboot required! 🙂

P.S. Special thanks to the DotBlag.Com blog for this little gem.