Reader Challenge

In Windows 2000 and Windows NT, groups provide a convenient way for systems administrators to grant common capabilities to a collection of user accounts. Test your knowledge about groups (and practice for MCSE exams) with the following selection of multiple-choice questions. (Answers appear on page 32.)

Questions

1. Which of the following statements about groups is true?
   1. Global groups can contain local groups.
   2. Local groups can contain global groups.
   3. Both A and B.
   
   
2. You want your assistant, Bob, to be able to create groups for the domain, but you don't want to give away more rights than necessary. To which built-in group do you assign Bob?
   1. Administrators
   2. Account Operators
   3. Server Operators
   
   
3. You're a member of the following groups: accounting, sales, and executives. A Secrets folder contains the following group permissions: Accounting=Change, Sales=No Access, Executives=Full. What are your permissions for the Secrets folder?
   1. No Access
   2. Full

APRIL WINNERS
Congratulations to Chuck Thomas of Bel Air, Maryland, and Curtis Evan Izen of Brooklyn, New York. Chuck won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the April Reader Challenge. Curtis won second prize of a copy of Managing NT Logons (O'Reilly & Associates, 2000).

Problem
Dave overslept. His company had scheduled him to perform minor maintenance work before 7:00 a.m. on the accounting department's server, which is both a PDC and a file server for the 10-member department. Dave woke up at 8:00 a.m. and rushed to the office, but he was too late. His boss was waiting for him, and three users had already logged on to the server. "You're in trouble," Dave's boss exclaimed, "because I needed you to finish your work this morning. These three users are in the middle of closing the books for the month and can't stop their work."

"I'll be out of trouble in a minute," said Dave. "I can do my work because I don't need to take the server down, and three users won't strain the server to a point that might prevent me from performing my maintenance work. Those users can continue working, but new users can't log on." What trick does Dave know that will let logged-on users continue their sessions but won't let new users log on to the server?

Solution
Dave needs to pause the Server service to prevent logons but not terminate current sessions. Stopping the Server service disconnects existing sessions, but pausing the Server service merely denies additional logons until the administrator resumes the service.

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