Disable Administration Shares & Auto-Generation of 8.3 Filenames for Servers

When hardening a server, both the Administrative Shares and Auto Generation of 8.3 Filenames are usually disabled.

To disable Administrative Shares for Windows servers:

1.     Open Registry Editor (Start > Run > regedit).

2.     Navigate to

               HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\AutoShareServer.
              
               AutoShareServer must be set as type REG_DWORD

3.     On the Edit menu, click Modify.  In the Value data box, type 0 and then click OK.

4.     Exit Registry Editor.

5.     Stop and then start the Server service by issuing the below commands at the command prompt:

               Net stop server
               Net start server

The abovementioned steps will remove the administrative shares and prevent them from being automatically created in Windows.

To disable Auto Generation of 8.3 Filenames for Windows servers:

1.     Open Registry Editor (Start > Run > regedit).

2.     Navigate to

               HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NTFSDisable8dot3NameCreation.

3.     On the Edit menu, click DWORD.  In the Value data box, type 1 and then click OK.

              
               0 - Enable 8dot3 name creation on all volumes on the system
               1 - Disable 8dot3 name creation on all volumes on the system
               2 - Set 8dot3 name creation on a per volume basis
               3 - Disable 8dot3 name creation on all volumes except the system volume

4.     Exit Registry Editor.

5.     Reboot the server.