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Using Windows 10 Administrative Shares: by Adam Bertram, Business News Daily Contributor

Administrative shares in Windows 10 still exist but require additional configuration to work properly between computers in a workgroup. By default, User Account Control (UAC) restricts access to these shares remotely. To enable administrative shares, the registry key LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy must be created or modified and set to a value of 1 on the remote computer. This disables the UAC restriction and allows shares like C$, admin$, and IPC$ to be accessed remotely after providing credentials.

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62 views3 pages

Using Windows 10 Administrative Shares: by Adam Bertram, Business News Daily Contributor

Administrative shares in Windows 10 still exist but require additional configuration to work properly between computers in a workgroup. By default, User Account Control (UAC) restricts access to these shares remotely. To enable administrative shares, the registry key LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy must be created or modified and set to a value of 1 on the remote computer. This disables the UAC restriction and allows shares like C$, admin$, and IPC$ to be accessed remotely after providing credentials.

Uploaded by

Nimish Madanan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Using Windows 10 Administrative Shares

By Adam Bertram, Business News Daily Contributor


Aug 23, 2018

The administrative shares that have been part of Windows for a long time have been a
staple for remote file management for IT pros. Administrative file shares are the hidden
shares on a Windows computer with a name that ends with a dollar sign. By default,
these shares share out the contents of every drive on a system and also include shares
like admin$ and IPC$ to perform various administrative functions. In Windows 10, these
administrative shares still exist but require an extra step in order to work properly. Let's
go over how to setup these administrative shares in Windows 10.

First, in domain environments, the administrative Windows 10 shares work as they


always have. You simply provide a domain user account with permission to connect to
the remote machine and it works. However, an issue arises when you have two
Windows 10 computers in a workgroup. While in a workgroup, when you attempt to
connect to an administrative share on a Windows 10 computer you will be prompted for
a username and password as expected but you will receive a misleading Access
Denied error message.

This is related to User Account Control (UAC) and requires a registry modification in


order to work properly. By default, UAC remotely restricts these shares from being
accessed. In order to successfully connect to an administrative share, you'll need to
disable this feature. To do this, you'll need to create (or modify) a registry DWORD
value called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set it to a value of 1. 
To do this, either log onto the console of the remote machine locally, via remote desktop
or some other remote console application. Then, type in regedit in the search bar, which
will bring up the registry editor.

Once in the registry editor, drill down to the


path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPolici
esSystem. Then, right click on the System, click on New and then choose DWORD
(32-bit) Value.
From here, you are given the option to name the new registry value. Give it a name of
exactly LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and hit Enter.

Once you've created the registry key, it will have a value of 0; this needs to be a 1. To
change it to a 1, double click on the registry value and put a 1 in for Value data.
This will create the registry value and should be all you need to connect to the
administrative share successfully. This method should open up all administrative shares
which consist of the C$, any additional drive shares, admin$ and IPC$.

When this step is complete, attempt to connect to an administrative share again. You
should again be prompted for a username and password. Once given the appropriate
credentials, you should now be presented with a file system listing of everything in the
location that the share represents.

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