Guest access in SMB2 disabled by default in Windows

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This article describes information about Windows disabling guest access in SMB2 by default, and provides settings to enable insecure guest logons in Group Policy. However, this is generally not recommended.

Symptoms

In Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, or Windows Server 2016, the SMB2 client no longer allows the following actions:

Guest account access to a remote server.
Fall back to the Guest account after invalid credentials are provided.
SMBv2 has the following behavior in these versions of Windows:

Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education no longer allow a user to connect to a remote share by using guest credentials by default, even if the remote server requests guest credentials.
Windows Server 2016 Datacenter and Standard editions no longer allow a user to connect to a remote share by using guest credentials by default, even if the remote server requests guest credentials.
Windows 10 Home and Professional editions are unchanged from their previous default behavior.
If you try to connect to devices that request credentials of a guest instead of appropriate authenticated principals, you may receive the following error message:

You can’t access this shared folder because your organization’s security policies block unauthenticated guest access. These policies help protect your PC from unsafe or malicious devices on the network….

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