Anyone with a good handle on getting a Vista client to play nice with a Win 2k server?

April 4, 2007 12:26 PM

Anyone have any Windows networking experiance? I'm in need!

I'm sitting at work, trying to get a new computer on our network. I'm kinda new at this place, and don't really have the whole place figured out. I need somehow have this shiny new Vista (business ed.) PC boot into the, er, "Network Logon" screen that our older 2k boxes do. Crap, I really wish I knew more about networking. :(

I KNOW there must be a way to do this in Vista. I think we're authenticating against an Exchange server, or Active Directory, or something. Somehow we've got all the same logins at all the computers. Except the Vista one. :(

Thanks in advance, ask if you have any qualifying questions!

posted by TrueVox to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Are you trying to add it to the domain?
posted by Lyn Never at 12:31 PM on April 4, 2007

Sounds like you need to add the new machine to the proper domain. Right click on My Computer->Properties->Network Identification. Follow prompts from there.
posted by skwm at 12:32 PM on April 4, 2007

Note that you may need Domain Administrator access to join the machine to the AD. The default allows anyone to join a machine but the default is one of MS's wackier security defaults, many admins change it when setting up the directory.
posted by Mitheral at 12:46 PM on April 4, 2007

Response by poster: I *THINK* I'm trying to add it to the Domain, yeah. That sounds about right. A domain could look like this:

lala.somewhere.com

Right? And then the computer name could be:

compluter.lala.somewhere.com

Right?

Also, Skwm, thanks for the advice, but it's telling me it can't find the "Active Directory Controller for this Domain" or something to the effect. Is that bad?

Thank you all, I'm SO lucky to have a great community like AskMeFi behind me! :D
posted by TrueVox at 12:47 PM on April 4, 2007

Sounds like you need to get the real name of the domain. It certainly could be lala.somewhere.com but it could be a variation on that. Are you getting an IP address via DHCP? If so, go to a command-prompt and type ipconfig. The Connection-specific DNS Suffix is very likely to be your domain.
posted by toomuch at 12:57 PM on April 4, 2007

Is there some reason you cannot look up the pertinent information by examining the correctly configured 2K boxes? We're not going to be much help to you when it comes to figuring out the name of your domain controller...
posted by prostyle at 1:01 PM on April 4, 2007

Yeah, it's probably not something.com, that's an internet domain which isn't exactly the same as an Active Directory domain. It can be, but generally it's not.

On your Win2K boxes, it'll be in the login field called "Domain" under the username and password (click the Options button if you only see those two fields on the login screen).
posted by Lyn Never at 1:06 PM on April 4, 2007

Also make sure to change the computer name to something other than "computer" or "home". Having a generic name already used by AD can cause logon issues.
posted by jmd82 at 2:06 PM on April 4, 2007

I'm betting from the nature of the question that he is as much "network admin" as anyone else.

Also- let's just make sure you have network connectivity of some kind; you won't be able to join the domain if, for example, you aren't configured on the network.

Try going to a command prompt on the Vista box and doing a "ping computername" where computername is one of the win2k machines. If you can't even do that, then you aren't on the network, or are not resolving DNS correctly- and you can't join a domain if you're not doing that.
posted by hincandenza at 2:40 PM on April 4, 2007