Pause Windows 2003 Server Shares

A part of my job that I really enjoy is when I’m faced with challenges and learning new things to achieve them.

Today I was looking for a solution to pause or temporarily disable file shares in Microsoft Windows Server. There are some obvious and easy answer to do this such as removing users / groups, or stopping or pausing the Server service. However I had a couple constraints, one of which was keeping the Server service on as it was needed for a live migration. The other constraint was that I didn’t want to remove users and didn’t want to completely remove the shares as I didn’t want to recreate them as well as the permissions that go along with them.

I asked around but no one really had an answer for me, but I always know that I can turn to my fellow netizens. I turned to a great site, experts-exchange.com where I was able to post my question and receive several responses from people. Most of the responses weren’t that great or were things I already knew, but one person provided a really good solution. Here it is:

export registry: HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Services\LanmanServer\Shares
Then delete shares that you don’t want during migration (compmgmt.msc)
After migration -> import that registry hive back
restart server service

As an extra precaution I also backed up from the LanmanServer level.

This solution worked great and I was able to perform my migration without worrying that anyone would be accessing the server shares and with some extra relief that I wouldn’t have much post migration work to perform.