Service design change: Default domain

Managed Workstation service design change: Default domain

What and When

We’ll be making a change to all managed workstations over a period of a week, in increasing numbers of computers. A few will get this change Friday night 9/30, more Monday night, and so on. Every managed workstation get this change by 10/7.

Each Windows computer has a setting called the default domain which determines which Windows domain the computer’s logon interface defaults to for user logon. This setting is relevant for Windows 7 or older computers, but doesn’t mean much on newer versions of Windows.

We will be configuring this setting to be NETID, to help encourage users still logging into NEBULA2 to make the switch we’ve been asking for.

What you need to do

After this change, users on Windows 7 computers who were previously logging into NEBULA2 may log into NETID. If they have never previously done this and/or have never configured their desktop profile for their NETID user account, they may be alarmed because it appears that many items have gone missing.

They will need to go through the steps documented at https://itconnect.uw.edu/wares/nebula/adding-users/changing-to-netid-logins/#restore to move the missing items over to their NETID user profile.

More info

Users can override the default domain and continue to login using their NEBULA2 user account, but this is discouraged. At this time, less than 350 NEBULA2 user accounts are still active and the vast majority of customers are using their NETID user account. We do plan to turn off the NEBULA2 domain in April 2017, so customers still using their NEBULA2 user account should take this opportunity to switch.

Brian Arkills
Managed Workstation service owner