I run a lab at home. My setup is 1 WIN2KAdvSrv as a DC and 3 win2kPro workstations. All workstations are connected to the domain and all have valid domain user accounts. But I cannot assign local admin rights to any of the Domain User accounts when logged in as a local admin. I am able to see & connect to the DC through Network Neighborhood or from RUN command, but when I try to add user to the local admin groups, a popup appears informing me that the Domain cannot be found or contacted. When I close the popup and try to add again, the LOOKIN box is now grayed out. Any suggestions?

What you have to do is create the Local users on the local machine. These cannot be created through the network and each machines users must be created on each machine. Also be aware that once logged into the domain... users access permissions are taken from the domain and not the local machine which means that if a user is a power user on the domain and admin on the local machine their effective permission level will be set as Power user. So as an example, if you want to have 5 local users which are all the same on each machine you will need to go to each machine, log off the domain and back onto the local machine and create each of the 5 users. These accounts are then stored localy and not on the server. Likewise if the user then wants to use their admin local abilities they will need to log off the domain and back onto the local machine, complete the task and then log back onto the domain. Hope this sort of helps. Raa

Thanks for your reply. What I wanted to do is give them local admin rights without having to create local user accounts. I do this at work all the time. Add the domian user to the local admin group. I can do this on the local machines under Admin Tools/Local Users and Groups, but for some reason the domain cannot be found. I tried it using the NETWORK ID option under My Computer/General TAB. This did work. But for addtional users I need to do it through admin tools. That's where I am stuck. The lab is on a Win2k environment/DHCP enabled.

Look into roaming profiles. More control over user settings and permissions.....

Make sure you have DNS set up correctly on your W2K Server. AD relies heavily on AD and if it is not set up correctly, you will get that error. Also, specify the IP address of your server on your workstation in the DNS.