Hi there! 😀
That issue, ie. connecting Win9x<->Win7-10, seems fairly common, once every few days/weeks it is being discussed here.
At this point, I probably *should* (repeatingly) recommend using FTP and nothing else, but I won't 😉

Depending on your fileysystem and OS, things are from difficult to almost-easy.
For example, NTFS knows rights, FAT32 doesn't. If you share a folder located on a FAT32 disk, it causes less trouble.
Win 3.x+9x use file/folder access on a by password basis, Win NT on a by user basis.
Also, NTLM levels, encryption strenght and user names are a thing. Make sure most of the are equal on both PCs.

The threads that comes to mind first are these ones (since I was part of them), but there are likely many more at vogons:
Windows 98 PC suddenly stopped appearing in the Network on my main (Windows 7) PC
A good file transfer software for Windows 9X and Windows 7 ?

Another idea is to use an external network drive or an Raspberry Pi running Linux/Samba,
which can handle both old and new SMB protocols.

Edit: Wording altered slightly.
Edit: Welcome to vogons, btw. I hope you get this issue fixed. Good luck! 😀 Jo22

Thank you, Jo22. The threads you provided gave me a couple of more ideas to explore. There are almost 400 pages of results when searching this topic here on VOGONs, so providing those specific ones are a great help.

I've been contemplating creating a FTP or connecting to an SMB share with this machine as a last resort. My desktop and two laptops (Win 10, MacOS and Linux) already connect to one, I should just connect my two retro computers to it as well. I was just hoping I could recreate the success of my 486/Win 3.11 machine with something a bit newer.

I'll let you know what happens.

Windows 7 and 10 have always seemed to utterly hate Win 3 and Win9X, as far as network sharing goes. Microsoft's idiotic support gives people obviously incorrect information, ignoring what they have stated entirely, in most cases.
Since I've no desire to build a network server at the moment, in spite of a having a growing need for one due to having multiple systems needing more and more storage, and more content in need of local backups, I just push files from my Win10 system, onto whatever Win3/9X system I have powered up at the moment. A minor pain, but I do this rather infrequently, so I can deal with it. I no longer have a Windows 2K/XP system, otherwise I would see about using it as a storage hub of sorts.
It's funny trying to remotely create a new directory on a Win3 network drive, as the directory name is too long by default, and fails.

There are a few things to consider:

1. As of version 1709, Windows 10 has SMB/CIFS 1.0 disabled out-of-the-box. It can be re-enabled through the "Turn Windows features on or off" dialog.
2. Even with SMB/CIFS 1.0, the default policy is to deny clients that don't support encryption below a certain level. This can be lowered in the Network and Sharing Centre -> Advanced sharing settings -> All Networks
3. Even with both of the above, Windows 10 won't allow authentication using protocols below NTLMv2, this can be added to Win9x with the "Active Directory Client Extensions" addon from Microsoft.
4. Even with this installed, the credential pair used by Win9x to authenticate against the remote host can be unclear, so it's usually less of a headache to disable password-protected file sharing on the Win10 machine (on the same settings screen as point 2), which has the following caveat: Remote hosts can now establish SMB/CIFS sessions with your Windows 10 machine without any authentication, and although they cannot access resources by default, this still presents a security risk.
4a. Unauthenticated clients impersonate the "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" security principal. By default, and in any sane situation, this account should have no access to anything, but in this situation, it must be added to the ACL's of files and folders you want your Win9x boxes to be able to access. The default share-level security of "Everyone: Full Access" is acceptable, since the "Everyone" principal includes Anonymous Logon.

Side note: This is a risk of adding the "Everyone" principal to file/folder security. In most cases, when you want any logged-in user to be able to access a file, you should at least use the "Authenticated Users" principal, if not "Users", as the former includes accounts that are members of "Guests", or even no groups at all.

Last thing, I don't know if WIndows 10 responds to NetBIOS name resolution broadcasts so old clients can resolve SMB names to IP addresses, so from your Win9x box, you might need to access the Win10 PC by \\ip_address\share, but YMMV, I've had it work sometimes and not others, but using IP addresses avoids this little gotcha.

This got a bit rambly, sorry, hope it helps.

I enable the SMB1 client on Win10 and then set up a shared folder on the Win9x/XP machine as a means to share files back and forth. That is pretty simple to get up and running.

swaaye wrote:

I enable the SMB1 client on Win10 and then set up a shared folder on the Win9x/XP machine as a means to share files back and forth. That is pretty simple to get up and running.

Pretty much. Going the other way is messy and creates a lot of risk.

Just use FTP. SAMBA is slow and buggy as f.ck anyway.

I have exactly 0 problems with using SMB1 from legacy OS with my NAS (after I set client correctly according to this post: Re: Adding my 486 to my Network)

Saw this the other day:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_i … a-4.11-Released

Breaking changes in Samba 4.11 are now requiring Python 3 (in place of Python 2 support) and the SMB1 protocol support is now disabled by default. The client/server minimum protocol versions have been bumped to SMB2_02 by default with SMB1 support being officially deprecated and to be gutted out in the future.

I wounder how the Linux world would handle SMB1 being removed hopefully it will get people as riled up as the Canocal 32bit issue but I doubt it. For now have had no issues accessing SMB1 shares from 95-98-ME and NT4 accessing shares on FreeNAS 11.2.

I can confirm the above changes for Windows works all the way up to Windows 10 if you are using Windows to host your files.

For 9x I recommend logging in as the same user and password on 9x that you have on the host machine but obviously use a dedicated user account for that purpose.

You can also lock down access in your firewalls to specific IPs. <2000 use port 139. >=2000 use port 445

On the Windows 98 machine, try mapping a network drive to the location you're trying to access. I just recently set up networking between Win 98 and Win 10, and I found this strange behavior where if I try to access the shared folder on Win 10 from 98 by directly typing in the location in Explorer, nothing would ever come up, but for some strange reason, mapping the network drive gave me access.

RichPimp wrote:

On the Windows 98 machine, try mapping a network drive to the location you're trying to access. I just recently set up networking between Win 98 and Win 10, and I found this strange behavior where if I try to access the shared folder on Win 10 from 98 by directly typing in the location in Explorer, nothing would ever come up, but for some strange reason, mapping the network drive gave me access.

I tried doing that, in fact, that's how I access Windows 10 from 3.11. No dice with Windows 98 for me.

I gave up on trying to make it work through my LAN to/from Win 10 and 98. I've modified my SMB share settings on my FreesNAS server to permit SMB1 and ntlmv1 access, this is on 11.2 U6. So other than a complete lack of security on the share (which has nothing important on it), it's working beautifully, at least on my Win98 machine (I have yet to try connecting to it with 3.11).

And after some applications of compressed air, new thermal paste and installation of new drivers (over my now working network), this computer is ready to get some late 90's early 2000's games on it!

Thank you everyone for your advice and tips!

anyone find a solution, I'm not really wanting to go buy extra hard drives just to store my ISO files locally, my sharing was working and suddenly its not now, yesterday I could access windows 10's shares from my 98 and ME boxes, today nota, demands a password, no settings are changed SMB1 still installed and active, password protected sharing still off

I had problems getting Win7 and newer accessing password protected shares on Win9x, and solution ended up being installaton of Active Directory Services Client http://www.tmeeco.eu/9X4EVER/GOODIES/DSCLIENT.EXE
It may help with this situation too as it will improve Win9x ability to communicate with much newer stuff.

What I find works best is have all machines on the same workgroup, and log into each computer using the same username/password
password doesn't have to be anything special, I just use 1
Newer OS's are happy that it matches their expected workgroup\username format their expecting
Password requirement is matched for the even newer OS's that want it.
No need for DS client or other addon's or modifying the registry*
You DO need to install SMB1 on Win10 though

* Win7 may have needed the LMCompatibilityLevel reg key changed, can't remember if this was required in the end or not

I honestly don't get why anyone would insist on using a terrible protocol like SMB1 when they could just use FTP and be done with it..

I mean, take the example above - ISO files on a file share. Would 100Mbit ethernet and a flaky protocol like SMB1 be enough to mount and use them over ethernet?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-09-21, 10:45:

I honestly don't get why anyone would insist on using a terrible protocol like SMB1 when they could just use FTP and be done with it..

I mean, take the example above - ISO files on a file share. Would 100Mbit ethernet and a flaky protocol like SMB1 be enough to mount and use them over ethernet?

Yeh its fine and faster install times then period correct optical drives.
SMB's main selling point is what it always was, simplicity. No need to have a ftp server running, "client "built into the OS.
Although I guess with the work arounds needed now you could say FTP is easier, but I've never had any much trouble with SMB if I'm honest

FTP was the answer for me. Easiest was setting up vsftp on a linux system on my internal network. File sharing didn't work out, ftp server on windows 10 didn't work (can't connect to it, something about user authorization, setup is involved and more complicated than it should be). vsftp has trivial setup, and it just works. I can ftp to it from every other system in the house, and ftp from it to win98 using the native win98 ftp client.

The good thing about FTP is that it's old and primitive simple, like Telnet.

However, it can't do streaming.
Files must be copied as a whole, like it was done in days of the null-modem cable.

Playing music or videos off a NAS isn't possible that way, especially considering the file system limitations of Windows 9x.

In my case, FTP is good for stuff I do just one or two times and not constant passing of data between multiple computers. There's no useful FTP integration in windows itself for that, i.e I cannot do arbitrary passing of files between programs (and their own file explorers) using FTP, while the network shares are just like any regular folder/directory.