Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

logon

Synopsis

The process of having your credentials authenticated so you can gain access to the network or local machine.

Description

There are two kinds of logons in Windows 2000:

Logging on to a domain

If a user has a domain user account defined in Active Directory for a given domain, the user can log on to the domain and access shared resources on the network.

Logging on locally

If a user has a local user account defined in the local security database on a Windows 2000 computer, the user can log on only to the local computer and access resources only on that machine.

The usual way is to log on to a domain. Windows 2000 uses a single logon process, which means that users need only one set of credentials to gain access to all resources on the network (provided they have suitable permissions for accessing those resources).

Logon Names

There are two types of logon names a user can use to log on to a Windows 2000 network:

Downlevel logon name

This is the user account name for the user—for example, msmith for Mary Smith. The downlevel logon name for a user must be unique within the user’s domain. Downlevel logon names are used primarily when logging on to client computers running versions of Microsoft Windows earlier than Windows 2000.

User logon name

Also called the user principal name (UPN), this is the standard logon name for a user on a Windows 2000 network. It consists of three strings appended together:

• The user principal name prefix, which is the user account name and must be unique ...