We have a fax server here that drops all of its incoming faxes to a shared folder. Unfortunately, because of the way it was designed it cannot be joined to our local domain.
This means it has its own local account, and every time I reboot a username and password has to be entered to access it.
I wanted to find a way to allow me to access the drive without having to enter a username and password.
After some searching, I found a command line tool built into Windows that will do this:
cmdkey
This will allow you to store multiple username and password combinations for different network resources, while keeping them encrypted in the registry.
So, in my case I have a fax server on 10.10.27.231, and its username is fax, the password is fax.
To add it to Windows simply type this at the command line:
cmdkey /add:10.10.27.231 /user:fax /pass:fax
If you wanted to remove it from the cache, you would call it like this:
cmdkey /delete:10.10.27.231
Also, you can get a list of the currently remembered ones like this:
cmdkey /list
A simple command line tool, but saves you the aggravation of typing that in every time you reboot – Nice.
One more thing…Subscribe to my newsletter and get 11 free network administrator tools, plus a 30 page user guide so you can get the most out of them. Click Here to get your free tools
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
What about Windows XP. I typed this at the command line and notice that it does not recognize the command.
Hello David,
I did a quick check and you are correct – it is not in Windows XP. I believe if you can find a Windows 2003 server machine you can copy it from c:\windows\system32\cmdkey.exe
Have not had time to test and see if it works under XP.
Thanks for the tip steve. Timely post since I was looking for something just like this. I have a document server that are users access all the time, and I don’t want to give the password out but at the same time they need read-only access. This is the perfect solution. Just wish the doc server could just be on the domain!
Thanks for the article Steve. Always appreicate them 🙂
Glad to hear it Inger
No problem Jen.
Thanks for the article Steve. 🙂
I have a Windows 8 machine that has to login to the Windows 2003 server every time they restart their machine. Would I run this on the server or the client machine?
You would need to run this on the client machine…not sure if it works with Windows 8, but I think it will.
cmdkey.exe not found in xp. Where can I found cmdkey.exe ?