Microsoft® Windows® Desktop Deployment Resource Kit

Scripting Domain Adds

As you learned in the section "Join Domain" earlier in this chapter, joining computers to the domain can be a potential security risk if you include the domain Administrator password in your answer files. One solution is to create restricted accounts for adding computers to the domain; then including their passwords in answer files isn’t much of a problem. The Microsoft Knowledge Base article 315273 provides additional solutions for this problem.

Another solution is to script joining the domain after Windows XP Setup finishes. You can use Netdom.exe, as described in Appendix E, to join the computer to the domain. You can run Netdom.exe locally or remotely, making it a versatile utility for joining computers to domains after ...