Enabling Network Connection access on XP

[Tony]

Dear All,

There are a number of travelling staff in my client's office that need to
change there IP address on there laptop to access the internet from the
hotel. My client does not want to give them administrator access as they
include some unsophisticated staff and he worries about them compromising
their machines inadvertently.

I was thinking that it is just a matter of creating a local user account
(without Administrator privileges) on the laptop running XP, and disable the
"Prohibit access to properties of component of a LAN connection" under Local
Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates ->
Network -> Network Connections. Then ask the user to logon to the laptop
locally using the local user account.

However Microsoft states that "this setting determines whether
Administrators and Network Configuration Operators can change the properties
of components used by a LAN connection. Non-administrators are already
prohibited from accessing properties of components for a LAN connection,
regardless of this setting."

Has anyone come across this problem before, and do you have any solution?
Thanks in advance.

Thanks & Regards,
Tony

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Windows XP supports alternate network configurations. More information can be found in Help and Support.

I'm assuming that your client is using static IP addressing. If so, their setup would be the "alternate" configuration, with the primary configuration being for automatic IP and DNS Server assignment. When the network connection doesn't see a DHCP server to get an address from (hotels usually use DHCP), it falls over to the alternate configuration, which would be corporate LAN configuration.