Setup 2K clients in NT 4.0 domain

[Chris]

I have an NT 4.0 domain, and before I roll out Win 2003
Server, I want to upgrade all of my 9.x client to win 2k
pro. I have a few users, who need the ability to add
software, and hardware to thier pc, but I do not want to
give them Administrative control. I've tried to assign
them to the power users group, but when they install a new
app, it says they dont have permission to do so. Since I
dont have AD, and can't implement GP; Can I do anything on
the local machine to address this issue.

Second question:

In a trial, I assigned a NT4.0 Global group, to the
Administrators local group on a win2k pro machine. The
expected result was that members of that group could log
on to the 2k pro client and had admin rights. The
unexpected was that any member of that group could log on
to a different client, and access the entire directory
structure of the test machine using the hidden share
\\testmachine\c$. Can someone explain why that would be?

Thanks for all of the help

 

[Steven L Umbach]

To install certain software and install hardware they need to be a local
administrator. There may be workarounds to installing software by modifying ntfs and
registry permissions which may be easy or next to impossible to do. Group Policy
won't really help you out there but you can access local Group Policy by using
gpedit.msc. As far as administrative share access, that is normal behavior if the
users domain account has been added to the local administrator account on that
machine. Also at this point in time I would recommend you highly consider using XP
Pro on the clients, especially if you are going to be using Windows 2003. --- Steve