Using MMC Snap-ins to Secure Win2K Systems

One of the greatest challenges you face is ensuring that each machine on your network conforms to a standard security policy. Since Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 (SP4) came out, Microsoft has provided security templates and tools that you can use to accomplish this task. With Windows 2000, these templates and the tools to support them have matured and grown in functionality. Surprisingly, however, some administrators haven't heard of them, and many more administrators don't realize these tools' full potential.

This month, I show you how to use Win2K Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins to create, customize, and save security templates. I also show you how to use snap-ins to roll out and maintain template-based security policies.

Security Templates
A security template file is a text file that contains settings for various aspects of security, such as account and local policies, the event log, groups, system services, registry settings, and file-system permissions. By default, Windows stores these files with an .inf extension in the \%systemroot%\security\templates folder. . . .