Windows NT User Administration - Softcover

Meggitt, Ashley J.; Ritchey, Timothy D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565923014 ISBN 13: 9781565923010

Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Incorporated, 1997

Synopsis

Windows NT User Administration covers everyday problems faced by system administrators and goes beyond the GUI to describe the tools you need to solve them. The book covers the whole spectrum of user management: user security, user customization, and system resource auditing. You'll find real-world examples and many useful Perl scripts to help you keep your system humming.

This book is especially useful to administrators working in a large-scale environment. The examples are based on the authors' experience in setting up a user community that is in constant change (the student population of a major university); you can benefit from what they've learned and begin to automate tasks that otherwise would take up much of your day. The authors explain how to create large numbers of users and restrict their ability to modify the environment. Once you have your user community under control, you can use the Perl scripts in this book to audit activity on your servers and notify you automatically if anything goes wrong.

Many Windows NT books introduce you to a range of topics, but seldom do they give you enough information to master any one thing. This book (like other O'Reilly Animal Guides) is different. Windows NT User Administration makes you an expert at creating users efficiently, controlling what they can do, limiting the damage they can cause, and monitoring their activities on your system. Don't simply react to problems; use the techniques in this book to anticipate and prevent them.

About this title

Review

Windows NT's user-management tools can prove confusing, but this guide does a good job of explaining them. Taking a sort of God-and-humankind approach to the relationship between system administrators and users (an appropriate analogy), authors Meggitt and Ritchey first describe the basic formula that you can use to get users up and running under Windows NT. They then chronicle the customization tools available to administrators, detailing the philosophies and procedures involved in making groups, dealing out permissions, establishing domains, and creating trusts. They also tell how to keep an eye on users, providing a good analysis of the contents and formats of the various log files.

The authors explain how to use the command shell to accomplish important administration tasks--an important thing to understand, since it's much easier, for instance, to automate the creation of many accounts that way. Further, they show how to use Perl's string-manipulation power to administer systems, performing such tasks as altering the Registry and editing profiles. This book is quite Perl-heavy--you'll probably want some familiarity with the language before you attempt to analyze or modify the authors' instructions. --David Wall

From the Publisher

Based on real-world situations, Windows NT User Administration covers specific problems faced by administrators and the tools needed to solve them. Structured around three basic areas: user security, user customization, and the auditing of system resources, the book presents realistic examples, offers solutions, and features many useful Perl scripts to help administrators manage and automate tasks. Windows NT User Administration covers a broad spectrum of the issues faced by the NT administrator trying to create and manage users in a large environment. The book is based on the real-world experience of the authors in setting up their user community, and it discusses problems and solutions in user management under three major heads: user security, user customization, and the auditing of system resources. Windows NT User Administration is not just an explanation of how the NT tools work, but an explanation of how to make the admninistrator's job as automated as possible. Many existing Windows NT books try to cover too much information and wind up presenting trivial examples that do not do justice to the problems administrators actually face. This highly focused book attacks these problems head on, and it contains realistic examples and useful Perl scripts that help keep users and groups up and running in a controlled, well-managed way.

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Incorporated
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565923014
• ISBN 13: 9781565923010
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204