I intern in an IT department and am interested in setting up my own domain controller for my LAN at home. I have most of the skills I need to do it, just want to make sure everything's right before I begin such an undertaking. My setup goes from my cable modem to my wireless/4 port router. I have 3 XP machines on the router wirelessly and 1 Mac OS X (which isn't a must to be under Active Directory) wirelessly. I'm under the impression that I can plug a domain controller directly into my router and set it up for authentication only, while still allowing the other computers to make their internet requests directly through the router. I'd like to be able to set up an admin account and have admin rights on all, and the ability to log into any user account from any computer. Is this possible and fairly simple without dabbling too far into DNS/DHCP requests (since I don't want IP's from the server, just authentication). Keep in mind I'm not going through the domain controller for internet, it is just connected to a central router. Thanks in advance, -Morton

Most of what you want to do sounds like it will work assuming all your XP machines are Pro and not Home edition.

They are, thanks.

You may already know this but for the local admin rights on each machine I set up a technicians security group on the server, added my domain user account to the group and then added the technicians group to the local administrators group on each client. In that way you can add as many users to the technicians group on the server and they will automatically inherit local admin rights on each client. Computers = pain in the arse

Morton seems like my post and yours are very similar if you got it to work please see if you can help me look up my post thanks