Windows 2000 track general - automatically being logged off

Author

automatically being logged off

DaDnDe

2003-08-21, 10:01 pm

I have a friend who is having a strange problem. He is an administrator for a win2000 advanced server. It is a web server with SQL server 2000 as its only application. It is behind 2 firewalls and the only downloads its receives are patches, etc.

His problem is that he puts in his password in the logon screen.
he receives a message that personal settings are being loaded.
a few seconds later he receives a message that his personal settings are being saved.
then he is back at the "hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to logon" screen.

Now he is one of 3 administrators running this server (this is a state-owned server that contains several very large general information databases) and one other administrator is having identical problems. However there is one who can still get in ok. He checked the events log and it says that there was a successfull login and a few seconds later a successful logout.

To complicate matters, all access is by VPN remote terminal connections. the physical server is locked up and access isn't easily obtained and almost always a last resort that is time-consuming, expensive and generally not needed.

any help, ideas, or related info would be greatly appreciated.

DaDnDe

2003-09-02, 2:00 pm

ok for all that were interested in the solution.

The server had some logging and security tracking software installled called "Vault" from Source Gear software.

When the software was installed, it assigned various permission levels to groups. It assigned all the administrators a level called "web user". This is where the problems started.

The administrator logged in normally and the server started thru the logon script. this is why the logon appears successful. But when the server got to the "web user", the logon was stopped because they had no rights at all. So the logoff script was started.

The most unusual thing about this scenario is that the system logs basically showed no errors. The log shows a successful remote log on and a successful log off. The permission failures did not show up or anything.

The method used to fix the problem was this

the gold account was still functionable so they logged into the server.

then we created a test account and copied over the gold account permissions and then one at a time we added the permissions that the old administrator accounts had until the problem was duplicated.

The cause of the problem is still being looked at and probably been figured out but we aren't privy to that info so will have to wait for the grapevine.

But the install of Vault software provides several options and some here feel that the person installing the software picked the wrong option. The gold account still worked. so maybe the default setting was to restrict all rights to available accounts instead of automatically importing rights when installing. this would force u to reassign rights to administators which would be good. that way no permissions could be carried over.

hope that helps. not a lot of details, but the fact is. there are 3 admin's and he isn't the head honcho so sometimes its tough to find out info. we know what we know because the guy i no is the one who solved the problem.

Particle

2003-09-04, 10:36 am

Interesting problem DaDnDe. Thanks for letting us know the results.

B4yaman3

2003-09-04, 10:56 am

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

DaDnDe

2003-09-04, 11:06 pm

TY TY
least i could do. i really hate it when someone asks a question and no one posts an answer... lets face it... someone somewhere knows the answer...share the wealth! im broke most of the time...

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