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.
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
