Where I’m @

20041029

Pesky RIS
Another post just to put something out in the Googlesphere, this time about a minor RIS annoyance. In creating an image for kiosk computers, we disabled the Computer Browser and Server services, on the principle that they are unnecessary for that computer role. However, riprep barked, “Domain controller detected!” (Since stopping those services seems to give a pc the impetus to declare to the LAN that it is master of all it surveys.) As we all know, you can’t riprep from a dc. We got around this by restarting those services, setting them to start automatically, rebooting, and then disabling them once riprep got over itself and told us which services needed to be shut down manually.

20041014

Kiosk Configuration — Autologin
We prefer playing with the registry to the GUI tools for this task, which we encountered when needing to set up a kiosk at our workplace. Fortunately, the GRB is always willing to show us how to monkey around with the registry.

If you do prefer to do this through a GUI, then you want the User Accounts control panel. There you clear the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password”, and clear the box on the Advanced tab (you must be an admin to see this one) that says users must use Ctrl+Alt+Del to log on. You should get a popup that asks for the user info to use at logon when you hit OK. NB: If you do things this way, the registry does not store a visible key with the password as the value. This might be considered an advantage over monkeying with the registry directly, which results in your user’s password being displayed for anyone with registry permissions and a shift key to see.