User access on WinNT 4 Network...

[FIFO]

I work at a company that has a WinNT 4 network set up across many locations. There are some 14+ PDCs and a myriad of BDCs. The network is of course architected by the corporate IT folks in the company.

The situation that I am in is that the average user is configured so that they cannot do anything bad to the contents of the \winnt\system32 folder. This is now a problem because I need to update the hosts file in the \winnt\system32\driers\etc directory. I was hoping to be able to just push the updated file out to all of the affected PCs in the Netware login script that they all run. Unfortunately the rights are set only to allow reading but not writing.

The question in all of this is: How does one adjust the rights to a specific folder on a WinNT 4 workstation from the PDC/BDC that the PC authenticates against?

I have already searched through policy editor and there is nothing that jumps out that would indicate that it can be used to specify particular directory rights.

I do personally have an ID on the domain in question that has full administrator rights and access on the domain and on any PC that I log in from.

Thank you very much to anyone with info on how to do this!!!!

Jason.

 

[Smilin]

I assure you, you do NOT have 14 PDC's hehe

Some thing you might want to change from the get-go if it's not already like this...make sure "domain admins" is a member of "administrators" on each workstation. Then just push out the changes via the \\workstation\admin$ share. There are some articles on technet on how to do massive pushes like this with only batch files.

You would be in a much better situation if you were using WINS or DNS. Farting around with hosts or lmhosts files is a nightmare. I'm sure you could implement a WINS server with half the effort you are about to spend.

 

[stash]

I assure you, you do NOT have 14 PDC's hehe

Most large networks that run NT (I dont know if FIFO's qualifies) have many domains. Each domain would of course have a PDC. It all depends on which model the network uses...single domain, complete trust, master domain, or multi-master.

 

[FIFO]

Quite right STaSh. The corporation that I work for has an intranet composed of 1000s of routers and over 70,000 users. There are most definitly 14+ domains and hence forth that many PDCs.

Back to the issue at hand though. Smilin, you do make a good suggestion in regards to the admin share that is on all of the PCs. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of "red tape" and the fact that I did not choose to use the hosts file to start with, the other options are less than easy. I don't want to make enemies of those at the corporate level that I need to be my friends.

Do you happen to know the technet article #'s?

Thanks,
Jason.