login locally (automatically) question (if there's such a thing)

[Guest]

I have a lab with 30 Windows 2000 Professional machines in a workgroup
setting. I know within a DOMAIN, everyone in the domain can login to any
local machine without having to create his/her username on the local machine
first. I wonder if there's a way that I can achieve the same thing locally?
The reason I am asking this is because I want anyone to use the machine(s)
without me having to create his/her username manually, and that no-one else
can read his/her files besides the administrator of the lab.

 

[Guest]

It has been a while since I have managed a lab, however, our solution was to:

configure the workstation to autologon with a generic local account, this
account was a member of the guest group so the profile would not be
persistant btw logons.

a application would run on startup that would prompt for ID/PW and connect
or map a drive to a file share, Home directory, etc for the student. They
were cautioned to only save files in this location since a logoff would
delete any locally stored files.

if there was more than an two minutes of inactivity, a full screen
screensaver would appear the would require there ID/PW (saved from the
previous application) to regain access to the desktop, after ten minutes the
workstation would force a autologoff and therefore a autologon.

we used a scripting utility called winbatch to create all our management
tools; however if you are familiar with VB you could easily accompish the
same.

Good luck