SMB/CIFS support for File:// URLs in CRL Distribution Points: Nup

According to Brian Komar, CDP and AIA extensions won’t work any more with file://\\server\share URLs as of Windows Vista SP1 / Windows Server 2008.

Note: With the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, support for Common Internet File System (CIFS) or Server Message Blocks (SMBs) through a File URL was dropped for AIA and CDP retrieval.

From Windows Server 2008 PKI and Certificate Security, page 245.

Why post it here? Because I couldn’t find this information on the interwebs, only in a book. I spent 20+ minutes looking!

A book. In this day and age!?

Aha! Here's the KB article describing the change! https://support.microsoft.com/kb/946401 

(if like me you got hung up on SMB or CIFS being a keyword for the change, well, there ya go. I guess that file:// just implies whatever you've got going on in your redirector, so while SMB/CIFS might be most common in Windows networks, it could have been NCP/NFS/Whatever here.)

Hope that saves you some searching, future-Tristan.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Thanks! I was trying to get cifs to work and your blog entry was the first one that popped up on Google.
• Anonymous
  February 10, 2013
  Thanks, Past Tristan! I was again looking for this information and couldn't find it anywhere! And then, I stumbled across your (er, my) blog. Most useful. Thank you for anticipating your future need.