AutoLogon on a Windows 2008 Member Server

While setting a domain member server to automatically log on when it boots is generally not a good practice, sometimes you just need to do it.

It’s easy enough on a standalone workgroup server – just go to the Control Panel, User Accounts, uncheck the box for “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”, and click OK – whereupon it asks you to specify the username and password. This is encrypted and stored.

However, when you join a server to the domain, this option becomes unavailable.

So how do you get it back? A registry hack, of course!

Open Registry  Editor, go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, and make a String Value (REG_SZ) called AutoAdminLogon. Set this to 1.

Here’s a CMD prompt version you can copy/paste:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon” /v AutoAdminLogon /t REG_SZ /d “1″ /f

Once you’ve done that, you can go back into the Control Panel, User Accounts, and the option will be available again. Make sure you use domain\user for the user account to specify the domain user. Of course, that user must be a local administrator on the server.

Tags: Autologon