Why will Microsoft finally disable SMB1 in Windows?

Why will Microsoft finally disable SMB1 in Windows?

Why will Microsoft finally disable SMB1 in Windows?  Disabling SMB1 in Windows enters final stage.

Microsoft’s official announcement states that work on disabling the 30-year-old SMB1 file-sharing protocol in Windows has entered its final stages.

Previously, SMB1 was not installed by default in the Windows 10 operating system; now, the company is working on disabling it in the Windows 11 Home Dev Channel beta version as well.

According to the introduction , the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is a network file sharing protocol and is implemented in Microsoft Windows as the Microsoft SMB protocol.

A set of message packets that define a specific protocol version is called a dialect, and the common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol is a dialect of SMB.

SMB and CIFS are also available on VMs, several versions of Unix, and other operating systems.

Over time, SMB1 is considered outdated and unsafe. Ned Pyle, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server High Availability and Storage Group, noted in a blog post that “if you install a Windows Insider Dev Channel build on any variant of the Home edition, the SMB1 client will not be installed.”

This means that there are no longer Windows 11 Insider builds with any part of SMB1 enabled by default, and this will also be the default behavior in the next major Windows 11 release.

However, this transition will not affect upgrades for users who are already using SMB1. SMB1 is not gone, administrators can still reinstall it.

Additionally, Pyle has announced that SMB1 binaries will be removed in a future release; Windows and Windows Server will no longer include drivers and DLLs for SMB1.

However, Microsoft will provide out-of-band, unsupported installation packages for organizations or users who still need SMB1 to connect to old factory machinery, medical equipment, consumer NAS, and more. More details on this are planned to be announced in a few months.

“I’d have to save this Home Edition change for last,” Pyle said. “It’s going to cause pain to consumers who are still running very old devices, the group least likely to understand why their new Windows 11 laptops can’t,” Pyle said. Connected to their old network drives. I’ll do my best to spread the word across the consumer channel.”

He also shared a list of vendors and products that require SMBv1, so that users can effectively avoid it and not be hindered when switching to a newer, more secure version of the SMB protocol.

Users interested in disabling SMB1 on the server can check this Microsoft support page for detailed instructions .