How to enable admin$, C$, IPC$ 2019

Question

Dear Team,

I am doing the Nessus scanning for windows 2019, But Nessus giving error that please configure admin$ c$ and IPC$ with admin privilege. Because Nessus scan through SMB.

So please give deatail solution.

Answer 1

On the server, open an admin command prompt and run "net share" to see if those shares exist or not.

Check the registry key listed in this article to see if someone disabled the admin shares.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/remove-administrative-shares

If the shares exist, then using an admin account on some other pc, use Powershell to test to see if you can access them.

Get-ChildItem -Path  '\\servername\c$'

If that fails, test to see if the firewall is blocking access to port 445.

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName servername -CommonTCPPort SMB

If everything works ok, then it would appear that Nessus is not using an administrator account to authenticate to the server. Check the security eventlog on the server for logon failures when you run a scan. Refer to the Nessus documentation as to how to configure it for scanning.

Answer 2

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

Based on your needs, I recommend you refer to the following link to enable administrative sharing by modifying the registry.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/problems-administrative-shares-missing

Note If you modify the registry incorrectly, you can cause serious problems. Therefore, follow these steps carefully. For additional protection, back up the registry before you modify it. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, see How to back up and restore the registry in Windows.

I hope the information above is helpful.

Best regards

Zunhui

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