Why are different users encountering different situations authenticating to a NAS in Win Explorer?

Question

I'd like my users to be able to access their personal SMB shares on a Synology NAS on the local network, using Windows Explorer.
I have found that, on different workstations, as well as from different user accounts on the same workstation, the NAS seems to react differently.
When a share is accessed, the NAS would first ask for the user's credentials.
1.) In some cases, when clicking on the NAS under Network in Explorer, a pop-up dialog is shown, prompting for username and password input. Then, according to the given username, that user's home folder is displayed in Explorer - this is the desired scenario.
2.) In some other cases, clicking on the NAS under Network in Explorer, no login prompt is shwon, Instead, all available shares are shown, including the one containing all the users' home folders, which should only be available to the administrator. This should be the case only when Windows already authenticated to the NAS with admin credentials.

The way I think this works is: once authenticated to a network share, Windows stores that login in the Windows Credentials manager: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/accessing-credential-manager-1b5c916a-6a16-889f-8581-fc16e8165ac0
In cases where I encountered situation 2.), I checked the credentials manager and found that even though no credentials for the NAS were saved, (i.e. the section under Windows Credentials said "There are no Windwos credentials."), it produced this behavior as if the client was logged in with admin credentials.

Is it possible the client is logged in even though the login does not appear in credentials manager?
In any case, how can I make sure all users consistently encounter situation 1.) (login prompt when clicking the NAS, only proper home folder visible after login)?

Answer 1

Hi ,

Is it possible the client is logged in even though the login does not appear in credentials manager?

If you pressed "Remember my credentials", then credentials will be saved in Windows Credentials.

If you didn't say remember, then it will last as long as the current Windows user is logged in.

If you want to force the credentials to be forgotten, try to run below command:

net use \\server\share /delete  
  
klist purge  

As picture below:

Then check if the pop-up dialog appears.

Best Regards,
Candy

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Answer 2

Thank you, unfortunately these commands aren't doing what I expected.

The output to the first command says: "Could not find network connection" this is the same if I use the NAS's IP address instead of the host name.
The output of the second command is the same as yours.

However, after running these commands, I can still access all the shares without the login prompt coming up.

For this reason, I logged out and logged back in with the same user.

• Observed behavior is:
  Now the login prompt does come up, but only as I try to access one of the shares (1. click on NAS icon > shares are listed 2. click on the "userhomes" share > login prompt is shown).
  The problem with this is, users, cannot authenticate to their home share.
• Expected behavior:
  It should come up as soon as I select the NAS (click on NAS icon > login prompt is shown immediately.