Smoothwall not connecting to AD after windows updates

[Paid_Peanuts]

Did the usual round of windows updates to our domain controllers this weekend - Server 2012 R2.

Later we noticed Smoothwall was prompting users for credentials.

Had a look in Smoothwall under:

Services > Authentication > Directories

to find our Active Directory wasn't happy - something to do with Machine Account - password validation.

 

The result was Smoothwall couldn't query AD for any user or group details - hence everyone was getting NTLM authentication errors.

 

 

Contacted Smoothwall support and as ever great service, after a couple of calls and an hour later we tracked it down to:

 

HKEY Local Machine > System > Current Control Set > Services > SRV > Start (Reg_DWORD)

 

If the DWORD says 3, the server only allows Windows Machines joined to the domain to look at AD, As the Smoothwall is not a Windows machine and we use a Samba connector, for the Smoothwall to be able to authenticate users, the option needs to be set to 2 and then the server rebooted.

 

After the reboot we were back to normal.