SBS and Active Directory feedback

[BobMCT]

Can some of you please explain your experience using SBS to authenticate and control users on the network? I am doing some research for a coop with no user control and would like to implement an AD-like structure and WSUS to keep all the users in order and up to date.

Any feedback anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[ShackDaddy]

Your question makes it a bit hard to figure out what you know or don't know already, but here's my try at answering it:

Once you've installed the server, you set up users in one place, which is a "domain". You "join" all the participating computers to the "domain" or perhaps you don't, but you at least point to the server for DNS resolution. Then when a user sits down at a random computer, he\she puts in his\her username\password and has access to network resources. Typically users have additional drive letters (X, Y, Z) show up on their computers and when they go to them they see files stored on the server. Users usually save things to those drives instead of to the local C: or D: drive, so that you can back up that data on the server every night.

It's fairly easy to restrict individual user's access to different things on the server, or even use Group Policies to prevent certain users from using the internet, etc...

How you set things up will depend on what the resources are that you are trying to provided orderly access to.

Dave Shackelford MVP
ThirdTier.net
TrainSignal.com

 

[BobMCT]

Thanks, Dave.

Sounds pretty much like I expected. Thank you.