Re: New employee, same computer -- what to do?

Hi there

"DWalker" <none@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eh14Cj8QGHA.2536@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
By "local account" I mean there is a local username that is created when
the computer is set up... When you first install Windows (or turn on an
OEM computer for the first time) it asks you for "your name". Doesn't
that name become a local logon? There is a list of users who are
allowed to log on to the local computer, and that's what I meant by
local account. Don't you HAVE to have a local account? Maybe my
terminology is wrong (I am a programmer but I don't have formal network
or AD training).
The only local accounts you have to have are administrator and guest (the
latter is disabled by default). When you set up an XP machine to be part of
a workgroup (rather than a domain), you are taken through a wizard that asks
you to create local accounts. If you join the domain during setup, you
don't get this. If you are prompted to create user accounts, just create a
dummy one and delete it when you're joined to the domain.

It is not considered good practice to rename user accounts to deal
with peopel coming and going. I have never heard of people doing that
before.

Never? No one does this? Not even in small companies?
Never seen anyone do it in practice.

How do you name your computers?
Personally, I use the asset tag (serial number) of the machine as its names.
Other naming shcemes I've seen are based on location. For a small company,
how about naming machines after something abstract (e.g. moons of Jupiter),
cartoon characters, or something like that?

When giving permissions to various resources, use groups. As a
general rule (home directories being the exception), never assign
permissions on a resource to a user directly. Give a group (e.g.
"Marketing department") permission to a resource, and make the
relevant users a member of that group.


There are 7 people in the company; everyone does marketing; and
basically everyone has an occasional need to see files stored in the
various subfolders on the one shared directory on the server. So we
don't make big use of groups. Maybe we should, and everyone does have a
good domain logon password, but everyone has access to all the shared
files on the server. (That is, we actually do use groups, and everyone
is a member of the one group.)
In which case, there's no real need to rename user accounts to ensure people
have access to the correct resources, since everyone pretty much has access
to the same things.

We have always named a computer after the user who is sitting in front
of it. Usually the user outlasts the computer (the employees have
generally been here 10+ years, while the computers last about three). I
didn't know of any other logical way to assign things; as I said, when I
have reinstalled Windows on a computer, it asks "what is your name" so I
gave it the user's name, and that became (I think) a local logon. There
is also a domain logon for that user.

I want to preserve the icons on the desktop, as I mentioned before, and
those seem to change when you log in and out using different names.
This is always an issue when people want to migrate from workgroups to
domains (or in your case a hybrid kind of setup).

So bottom line, the computer is *currently* named after the previous
person who sat in front of it. I really can't go back in time and
change that. Now, I would just as soon name the computer after the new
person who is sitting in front of it, so that we know that it's Jane's
computer when we see it in network neighborhood, or want to connect to
it to use her label printer, or whatever. That's the easiest and most
logical way to name a computer, it seems.
It can be, but then you come up against issues where people come and go.
It's a compromise.

In bigger environments where you never hang printers off the back of PCs,
and have better processes to keep track of machines, the computer name is
often irrelevant.

Even if I decided to no longer name it after a person, but instead want
to call the computer and the logon Reception or whatever, I would still
have the same question. How do you rename a computer and change the
local logon and preserve the icons on the desktop and the files in the
My Documents folder?
Renaming a computer doesn't affect user settings.

I am not so concerned about getting access to the
domain resources (the one shared folder); I know how to do that. (The
important files are on the server, but a few not-so-important files are
in My Documents, which is local to the computer, and I would like to
keep them there.)
I hope they're being backed up regularly.

So probably we have done things non-optimally, but now that things are
the way they are, how can we rename the computer and the logon and keep
the icons and local documents?
Renaming the computer isn't an issue in this regard. Just go ahead and
rename it. Of course, if you have printers and other things that are
shared, there will be a bit of trauma as this changes, but with only 7 PCs
it should be fairly easy for your people to work things out.

I would, however, recommend that the way forward is to dispense with the
local accounts and just use domain accounts, certainly for any new
employees.

Regards

Oli


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