Protocol management is serious business. More so for a platform like Windows 11 with its support for legacy technologies and protocols. One such protocol, SMB1, has now seen sunset.
The Home version of build 22610, the most recent build of the OS available for Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels, formally removes the SMB1 client from the operating system. This is a change that Microsoft announced a long time ago, and has now become a reality.
Redmond will introduce the same change in the next stable version of the operating system.
That is to say, the next major feature update for Windows 11 set to become available later this year will disable SMB1 by default as well.
As announced in the release notes of the above build:
“Windows 11 Home edition Dev and Beta Channel builds no longer enable the SMB1 client by default. If you have installed SMB1 manually or upgraded from a previous version of Windows where SMB1 was installed, upgrading to the latest Dev and Beta Channel build will not remove SMB1.”
So, there you go. The demise of SMB1.
It has been a long time coming, as Server Message Block 1.0 was created by IBM for file sharing in DOS. Microsoft later introduced the SMB protocol in its LAN Manager product.
The company actually started the transition away from this protocol all the way back in 2017 when it rolled out Windows 10 Redstone 3, which officially went by as the Fall Creators Update. Took Microsoft all this time to finally pull the plug.
As the software titan explained earlier this month, it stopped installing the SMB1 server service in any editions of Windows and stopped installing the SMB1 client service in most editions of the operating system.
Once the change officially happens in the production builds of Windows 11, SMB1 will continue to be made available on devices where they are already enabled if an in-place upgrade is performed.
The rest of the users will be out of luck.
