Logging Into Domain without Domain Controller

[deejay33]

Hello All,

I have a quick hypothetical and question about Domain Controllers.

In our office we have only one DC. I am going to setup a second for redundancy but right now, I want to understand where we are now. We have several Windows 2003 servers in the domain and our users are given access to some directories on a couple of these servers through mapped drives.

Now if we lost our one server that is our DC, I believe our users would not be able to log into the domain and therefor would not have access to those drives because their local user accounts would not have rights.

My question is, on our laptops, when we log into them off the network, we still get into the computer using the domain account. So why wouldn't our users still be able to log into their domain account with the DC down? If it is possible, would they also have access to those mapped drives I talked about?

Thanks for clarification.
Daniel

 

[mrdenny]

They would be able to log into there local machines via there cached credientials. This does not work for mapped drives however, and they would loose there access to the network shares.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

 

[deejay33]

Makes sense. Thanks for the reply!

Daniel

 

[mrdenny]

No problem.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com