Good Morning,

I have enabled FIPS within my RHEL 8.8 box that is acting as a Standalone server. However when I enabled FIPS the Windows 10 and Windows 11 clients lose access to the Samba server. The error log shows "Failed to start SPNEGO handler for negprot OID list" each time. If I disabled FIPS then all works just fine but in my environment FIPS has to be enabled.

In addition I have tried multiple settings within the smb.conf to hard set SMB3/NTLMv2 but all result in the same thing. Has anyone gotten Samba working with FIPS enabled acting as a Standalone server? if so can you assist me with getting this working.

Thanks for your time

I know little about using FIPS, but is it enabled on the Windows clients?

The windows clients have fips enabled as well

Maybe share the working server smb.conf as well.

Here is what I have under global

[global]
workgroup = SAMBA
security = user
passdb backend = tdbsam
server min protocol = SMB3
server max protocol = SMB3_11
ntlm auth = ntlmv2-only
log file = /var/log/samba/test.log
log level = 10
server signing = mandatory
server smb3 signing algorithms = AES-128-GMAC, AES-128-CMAC


printing = cups
printcap name = cups
load printers = yes
cups options = raw


When the Windows Clients connects I get this error " Failed to start SPNEGO handler for negprot OID list"

If I turn FIPS off the clients can connect with no issues...it is only when I have FIPS enabled does it break. I have to take out server signing = mandatory and server smb3 signing algorithms but it still does the same thing and throws the same error.

You might try liaising with the samba devs....
https://www.samba.org/samba/support/