Fileshares: Connecting with the wrong hostname

Situation: Occasionally I need to connect to servers with names formed from a spoon of alphabet soup - impossible to remember. Of course, since the customer is always right, he gets to choose the names of his own server. I however, need to refer to computer names I can remember or that has a meaning.

Workaround: Put an entry in your hosts/lmhosts file (in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc folder), or if you have access to the DNS or WINS server, put the entry there, using your preferred name and the IP of the server you want to reach. If, for instance, a server is named something like SA823SX3B and you want to name it FILESERVER, just put in an entry for FILESERVER with the SA823SX3B's IP. It works for ping and many other services, but:

Problem: This does (by default) NOT work if you want to connect to a NetBIOS fileshare. You can verify that firewalls etc. is not the cause of this problem by connecting via \\SA823SX3B\fileshare and even by using \\192.168.0.1\fileshare (given that that's the IP of our example server).

Solution: You need to hack the following registry key on the server in question:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\
DisableStrictNameChecking

Set the value to 1 and reboot. You can now connect to the server using any name you please, as long as it is referring to the right IP address.

Caveat: On a NT4 computer, you will still not be able to connect without using either the real name or the IP address as reference.

See Microsoft KB 281308 for a description of this parameter.