The Group Policy Editor Interface

Figure 2: The Group Policy Editory Interface

The next three pages are not necessary for the actual process of restricting a computer to specific user IDs, but are just being shown to help explain why what we are doing works. If you should set up a computer to restrict access of unwanted users (in our case Domain Users), I would suggest that you do not run the screens in Figure 2 and Figure 3.

We are going to look at the Group Policy Editor, which is a program that has read and write access to the registry. Within the Group Policy Editor is a section that indicates what groups and users can log in locally to a local machine.

In order to start the Group Policy Editor, you can type the command gpedit.msc at the command prompt. After entering the command gpedit.msc at the command line, you should see the interface of the Group Policy Editor, similar to what is shown in Figure 2. Using this tool, there are many things that can be changed regarding the way the system behaves. We will only be addressing restricting access to individuals that would sit down and try to log into a machine from the keyboard.