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Active Directory?

B

BCinSC

Platinum Member
OK, so I'm reading and reading, and reading some more. I think I understand the premise, but not sure the value in my cases:

1) My Home Office with 2 Desktops, 1 Laptop and 1 Printer

2) A Law Office with a File Server, 5 Workstations, and 1 network printer

3) A Restaurant with a P.O.S Application Server, 4 P.O.S. Terminals, 2 Desktops, 1 Laptop, and 2 local Printers.

Do any of these scream for AD?

Thanks,
Bruce
 
None of them scream for it, but you could use it in the law office if you wanted. At home with so few computers there is no point, and at the restaraunt I will assume logging in and out would be too much of a hassle.
 
Use at law firm: To do what? Deny permission to the printer?😛



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lol - no.

If the employees are switching around computers a lot, so they can get to their documents and have everything setup the same. I guess you could do roaming profiles, but I dunno how to get that to work. and i saidy ou could use it at the law firm. dont really need to tho
 
Well they've got a NT4Server PDC now, but why, I dunno. They don't use any of the features it provides. Workstations are all XP (recent new hw purchases). No apps are on server and they all use their own machines only and save their documents to their own, albeit universally shared, directories on the server. Thinking of replacing server with new box running 2000 or maybe 2003. Do I even need 2000 Server, or would Pro work just as well? For that matter, do I even need server machine - heck, they could share local drive directories amongst themselves?
 
If I want to revert to a Workgroup, how do I keep settings and stuff? I tried simply removing one machine from Domain and lost everything custom. Can't even log back into domain.
 
no , they are small

as yak8998 says, maybe the law office if they are concerned with privacy/security
 
What settings are you talking about? Desktop and user profile settings?

If so, yes and no. Theoretically you could manually log in as an administrator and copy the user profiles from the server to the local workstation. I've been very unsuccessful with this.

No AD for home. (That one, anyway.)

As for the above scenarios... I would certainly use AD for the law office. Why? Put in a Windows 2000 domain. Enable Roaming user profiles, and enforce them (do not allow unauthenticated logins). Redirect the local "my documents", "favorites", etc, to a share on the server for each user. That way all of the data is on the server, and not on the workstation. That makes for MUCH easier backup (NOTE: If you go this route, backup is a MUST... they would lose EVERYTHING is the server went down without a backup). Security would be greatly increased simply by requiring AD authentication. Move the applications, or at least the installs for them, to the server. That's a major save of disk space on the workstations. The printer could be shared from the server. Access can be controlled to the printer if needed, and there is always printer and document auditing, in case an employee becomes suspicious, and the employer wants to watch them. Furthermore, it would be easy to route internet connections to all of the workstations through the server.

Maybe for the restaurant. I know that nearly all of the restaurants around here use either NT or 2k on a domain... however, they are always logged in as a single user... per machine. I suppose one convenient use for that would be to audit what operations were performed on each machine. Other than that... AD really would not be that useful.

Just my $0.02 worth. I'd love to hear a detailed explanation against what I've said.

Drew
 
I don't see anything on server (NT4 PDC) that contains user settings. I do see them on other local machines. Which seems to mean, that I've lost them for this one by leaving Domain - instant purge - thanks Microsoft. So, how do I keep them?
 
Originally posted by: BCinSC
I don't see anything on server (NT4 PDC) that contains user settings. I do see them on other local machines. Which seems to mean, that I've lost them for this one by leaving Domain - instant purge - thanks Microsoft. So, how do I keep them?
Click to expand...

A domain is there to authenticate. That is its purpose. Apparently it was doing so. Well, you left the domain. Either the user was indeed using roaming profiles, and the data is on the server, or the data is still on the workstation. Since it is XP, go to System Properties. Click on Advanced. Click on the Settings button under User Profiles. See whether the logins are local, or otherwise.

As for the "instant purge - thanks Microsoft" comment... the Microsoft engineers know what they are doing, and I'm 100% confident that whatever operation you executed performed exactly like it was supposed to. Domains are not to be played around with unless in a non-production (i.e. educational) environment, you have an excessive amount of time on your hands, or you know what you are doing.

 
OK. Quick side note: thank you for helping me out. I've been doing Windows and support for years - run every version including 2003, but never got heavily into AD, and was happy with 2000 enough to ignore XP for the most part.

Anyway, following your direction, appears local accounts. And the username.domain user no longer exists on this machine like it does on the others. Any way you can think of to get settings back? Also, why can't I log back into domain from this machine?
 
Do you have an IM client so that we could talk more quickly?

In that case... the only way to get that back would be with a file recovery program (google file recovery or restore). Microsoft doesn't like Windows servers without roaming profiles enabled - and I agree with them. Deleting the files, I suppose, would be a security measure: when a domain is disjoined, the "trust" is lost with the Windows machine... thus, it is considered a security risk. That user profile was considered part of the domain, so its files must go.

The only way to log back into the domain from that machine is to rejoin the domain. After you rejoin, then you will be able to log in.

Drew
 
OK, I guess my biggest question at the moment is: The mailbox for Outlook Express that this domain user had - did it get deleted when I left the domain?
 
As for the outlook express mailbox... although I cannot guarantee anything without looking at the setup myself, there is a good chance that it is gone.

With the 98 machine... it depends how user profiles are set up. It can be set up so that everyone is using one profile, or so that there are different ones. If there are different ones, they are to be found at c:\windows\profiles. If not, the contents of that profile are all over the hard drive: C:\my documents; c:\windows\favorites; c:\windows\desktop, etc.

Drew
 
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