Side effect of recent change to more secure defaults like "lanman auth = No" intentionally?

[Frank KInscherff]

HI Guenter:

although this little change of of "lanman auth = no" to obey to the
security panic overall, I was spending ages to get my environment
running after I did an upgrade test from ubuntu server 7.10 to 8.04. On
7.10 all my backup data and much more goes on a Network device (low
cost) which I only can access through samba, After the upgrade this
important drive was gone and started me to panic as one of my hard
drives began to report errors which indicated dying of this device w/
still same useful data on one partition.

I am not a Linux guru like you are, and I still do not understand if I
would overcome this "yes to no" by setting only the smbpasswd entry
different and then use the more secure setting to be "no". May be you
could help me out her w/ a little more step by step shell commands how
to do it ( I moved from Windows to Linux last year in Autumn getting a
real Linux fan, but still have some glitches I do not follow, cause I
use my Desktop and server to run my Marketing Consulting Company -
although they are all migrated to Linux now).

Apart from that  I'd like to say thank you for explaining me the default
change. It got my Netdisk back. I was then able to do a last Backup om
my ditchy Disk and swaped it w/ a new one.

Now, in terms of security this change at that time with no clear
announcement brought me into a very insecure situation in terms of
loosing a lot of data.

Again thanks a lot

    Frank

P.S. If I could go to "no" and still can get to my netdisk this would be
great!