Administrative share in Windows 7 forcing domain access

Question

With Windows XP, I used to access machines in the network (under a domain) via administrative share (hidden share, a.k.a. "C$"), authenticating myself as the local admin of each respective machine.

Recently, the machines were upgraded to Windows 7. And now, when I try to access them via administrative share on Windows 7, it forces me to authenticate under the domain.

Later I did some test with some Windows XP machines back again in the domain and it worked.

So... is it possible to do it in Windows 7 as local admin, like I used to do in Windows XP? (I really hope there's a way...)

Answer 1

Try typing in .\localadminaccount or machinename\localadminaccount in the username field of the credentials dialogue that pops up. Just because it tries to make you connect as a domain user by default, doesn't mean that's the only way to connect. ;)

Answer 2

The local administrator account is disabled by default under 7. Best practice would be to leave it as such.

If you really want a local admin accounts you can create an accounts set passwords, etc - with group policy preferences as well as assign the new account to the local administrators group.

The better practice would be to create a new domain group - say 'desktop admins' - and assign this group to the local administrators group. Put your domain accounts into this group to provide access.

Answer 3

You can enable this behaviour by adding the registry key descibed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951016.

Basically:

Under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Set:

LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy = DWORD 0x1