Flex your intellectual muscle
[Editor's Note: Solve this month's Windows NT problem and get the chance to win $100 or a copy of one of the author's books about NT. Email your solutions (don't use an attachment) to challenge@winntmag.com. Include your full name, mailing address, and connection to NT (e.g., administrator, user). Because of the number of entries, we can't reply to all respondents. Look for the solution to this month's problem in the April issue.]
The BigBiz Human Resources department is designing tests for new employees. We peeked at some of the questions for potential IT professionals to find out what qualifications BigBiz is looking for.
Problem
See whether BigBiz might hire you! Can you answer these questions?
- True or False: You can use ScanDisk on a 3.5" disk.
- What are the next three entries in this list: KB, MB, GB, __, __, __.
- Explain the abbreviations in the answers to question 2.
- FAT is the acronym for File Allocation Table. What is the name of the equivalent index (i.e., file location tracking device) for NTFS?
OCTOBER WINNERS
Congratulations to Joseph W. Davis, a senior consultant in
Litchfield, New Hampshire, and to Michael A. Bullock of Chicago. Joseph won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the October Reader Challenge. Michael won second prize of a copy of Windows NT Troubleshooting (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1998).
Problem
Today is Tom Terrific's first day of work. He meets the network administrator, who establishes Tom's domain user account (i.e., username, password, and user permissions) on the PDC. Back at Tom's cubicle, the administrator watches Tom turn on his computer, select Windows NT Workstation 4.0, and press Ctrl+Alt+Del when the Begin Logon dialog box appears. Tom correctly enters his username and password in the Logon Information dialog box and clicks OK. "Well, you seem to know how to use NT, so I'll just go back to work," the administrator says.
Tom rearranges the icons on his desktop. He opens Windows Explorer and drags the executable files for Microsoft Excel and Word to the desktop to create shortcuts. After going through new-employee orientation, he returns to his cubicle, shuts down his computer, and goes home.
The next day, Tom arrives bright and early, logs on, and finds the original desktop--not the desktop with his changes. He opens Windows Explorer and goes to the \winnt\profiles directory. He finds the subdirectory named TomT (his logon name) and all the correct subfolders. The Desktop folder has the icons for the shortcuts he created; nevertheless, his desktop isn't the same one he created. Why not? You can make the following assumptions: Tom didn't make any errors entering his logon information; Tom doesn't have a roaming or mandatory profile; when configuring Tom's account on the PDC, the administrator entered all the information, including permissions, correctly.
Solution
The workstation didn't recognize Tom as a user because the administrator didn't use User Manager for Domains to establish Tom's account on that computer. Because he wasn't a recognized user, the workstation automatically logged Tom on as a guest, loaded the default profile, and created a profile folder to match his logon name. However, the workstation discarded the guest profile changes at logoff.
When you set up a new user on a domain controller and skip the new user setup on the local computer, the user can still log on to the domain. However, unless you use User Manager to add the user to the local computer, the local workstation doesn't save changes to configuration options.
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