Is there a "super-admin" account in Win 7 or SBS?

CJ7

Posted 2010-06-09T05:17:36.920

Reputation: 1 060

1Craig, you have asked many questions by now on Super User. If you are getting good answers, you should try accepting answers that have answered questions by clicking the check mark next to them. This shows your appreciation for their effort and rewards answerers with a small rep bonus. – Stephen Jennings – 2010-06-09T05:37:45.950

Answers

The SYSTEM account on the domain controller has more privileges than even a member of Administrators. However, you are likely to cause damage if you start changing things that only SYSTEM has access to (they are protected from you for a reason).

(For completeness, though I definitely don't recommend it, you can run programs as SYSTEM by using psexec with the -s switch).

Other than that, there are no accounts more privileged than a member of Domain Admins. Members of Domain Admins are Administrators over the domain controllers (your SBS machine), and therefore can modify any user account and push any group policy out to any member computer.

Stephen Jennings

Posted 2010-06-09T05:17:36.920

Reputation: 21 788

Thats awesome! I didn't know about that one. I've only seen the windows scheduler hack done... not sure if it works in windows 7 though.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2004/11/27/271063.aspx

– James T – 2010-06-09T05:36:08.793

As Stephen said, the System account does have different and in some cases elevated privileges above those of the various Administrator accounts, but this is not an account to play with, it's used by the OS and various services.

In a Workgroup the Local Administrator account has the highest privileges and in a Domain, a member of Domain Admins has the highest privileges

Pulse

Posted 2010-06-09T05:17:36.920

Reputation: 4 389