## Chapter 3: Administering Users and Groups

Microsoft® Windows NT® users and groups should be familiar to UNIX administrators because many of the concepts for administering them are shared. Windows NT users are either real people or pseudo-users. Windows NT groups allows rights to a collection of users, rather than assigning individual users these rights. Users maintain home directories and can run logon scripts that perform a similar function to UNIX shell startup files such as .login, .profile, .cshrc, and so on.

Windows NT users also have profiles, which are a collection of personal settings for the graphical user interface (GUI). These profiles are analogous to the resource settings, Windows manager "rc" files, and app-defaults files used by the X Windows system on UNIX. These files contain menu items, screen backgrounds, and other preferences that control the desktop appearance. The home directory, logon script, and profiles make desktop computers "generic" in the sense that a user can log on and have his or her customized environment downloaded from a Windows NT server and attached to individual network drives. This is a radical change in the PC environment where computers are normally highly individualized to a specific user.

Windows NT allows much more control over user and group accounts than UNIX. For example, you can determine the specific time and day a user may log on, which computer and domain can be used, and if the user can log on through the Remote Access Service (RAS). Windows NT also provides administrators very specific control over password policies and their expiration. UNIX traditionally has overloaded the encrypted password information by including expiration information and relying on third-party tools to ensure secure password choices.

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Last Updated: December 1, 1997