Windows 2000 Quick Fixes

Display a special logon message

In today’s litigious business world, legal technicalities often overshadow good sense. For example, you have to give reasonable notice to potential thieves and hackers that your system is off limits—something that a reasonable person would assume from the start—or you might not succeed in prosecuting them. For this reason, you might want to display a custom message during logon that warns the person logging on that the system is restricted and that there are legal consequences for unauthorized access. Or perhaps you simply want to broadcast a message of the day or other information at logon. You can do so by defining a group policy setting. This message appears in a dialog box before the user is prompted for her username and password.

Create a custom logon message

You define a custom logon message through either the local security policy or the domain security policy. When both are defined the domain security policy takes precedence. Here’s how to set up a custom logon message through the local security policy:

1. Open the Local Security Policy console from the Administrative Tools folder in the Control Panel.

2. Open the branch Local Policies\Security Options.

3. Set the following policy settings:

   Message text for users attempting to log on

   Specify the text that you want to appear in the body of the dialog box as the message to the user.

   Message title for users attempting to log on

   Specify the title text that you want to appear in the title bar of the dialog box. ...