Domain vs Workgroup

[Guest]

I just got my husband in a lot of trouble at work. His notebook is a domain
member there. He brought the notebook home and asked me to help him unload a
lot of pictures onto his home computer, which is part of our local network
(workgroup). So I whet into his notebook (XP Pro), added his notebook to the
home workgroup, and set him up to transfer his pictures.

BIG trouble when he wanted to access his domain files, settings, etc. He
went back to work - the system admin was not pleased - spent several hours
reconfiguring my husband's notebook - and told him not to do that again. I
guess I'm lucky he didn't send home a note to me saying keep your mitts off
this notebook.

So - you can see I'm not up to snuff on domains vs workgroups. Any wise
words for me? Something I should have read?

Thanks,
lkd

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Well they allowed your husband to be a local administrator so they should
expect some of that by doing such though I am not excusing it particularly
if he signed a computer user policy forbidding such. I don't believe it took
them hours to reconfigure everything but that was probably part of
displaying their displeasure and trying to impress on him never to do it
again. A good admin could have fixed everything in ten minutes or so by
rejoining his computer to the domain.

Domains are used in larger networks that use one or more "domain
controllers" that contain the user accounts of all users in the domain for
centralized management of users, groups, and policy settings. When a user
logs onto the domain they are authenticating to their domain user account on
the domain controller and not a local user account on the computer itself
like workgroup computers. When you removed the computer from the domain
there was no way for him to logon to his domain account anymore which can be
done via "cached credentials" when a domain controller can not be located. I
believe that Microsoft should have a popup warning to that effect but to
this date they have not supplied such. What was done is not unusual as we
see similar posts in this newsgroup all the time. --- Steve

 

[Guest]

Was there some way I could have set him up to share files with his home
computer that would not have upset the domain settings?
(Home computer is XP also. Both were connected to the home workgroup via
wireless access point on a router.)

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Sure. You could have mapped a drive to the other XP Pro [with simple file
sharing disabled] computer and specify and select "connect using a different
user name" and then specify computername\user as the user name such as
computer1\Bob to connect to computer1 on your home network as user Bob and
then specify the password to use. To map a drive to a share use Windows
Explorer and go to tools - map network drive and browse to the share or
specify it using \\computername\share as the path. If he tries to access a
share and a box pops up asking for user name/password then enter
computername\user and then password if username alone does not work. ---
Steve

 

[Guest]

Thank you. I will try that next time.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Here's a link that explains how to do it.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/learnmore/domainjoined.mspx