Question

Restricted access to win XP professional

Physical security, Implementation, Security, System utilities, Security management, Information risk management, Policies, Remote users, Tech support, Help Desk, Third-party services, Servers, Windows, Windows 2000 Server, Networking, Network monitoring, Remote management, Networking Services, DHCP, DNS, Application security, Exchange, Instant Messaging, Encryption, Database, secure coding, Network security, Firewalls, VPN, Intrusion management, Incident response, Forensics, Wireless, Administration, Security Program Management, Compliance, Risk management, CRM, Disaster Recovery, Management, DataCenter, Desktop management applications

I have a small WORKGROUP with windows 2000 server and 5 windows XP professional systems. All computers can read/write each other. Now I want to make one XP client secure/restric access, so that no other computer can access that except only other XP computer. How can I do that?

Please advise.

Thanks in advance!

You'd be best off if your Win2K server is upgraded to a domain controller using 'dcpromo' at the command line. Then you would add all of your XP machines to the domain you have created and restrict access on ALL of the machines according to a single set of users which exist within active directory... If you cannot do this, then each XP machine actually controls it's own access locally and users need to be set up on each machine according to the access rights you would like for each workstation. The one thing you do not want to do is to try and use the default Administrator account to login as it is set to have many restrictions automatically. You would be better off creating a standard user on each workstation with Administrative rights by adding it to the administrators group and then using the login on each machine as:

machinenameuser
password

but again, you would have to maintain this on every machine you want to have 'standard' access... It works much easier if you create a domain. Then you just have a user who belongs to the administrators group and he can get into al of the machines as needed... OR when you want to restrict a users access, it is also more easily administered.