Windows Admin Center – without Domain Admin!

by | Aug 22, 2020 | HomeLab | 0 comments

Use WAC without DOMAIN ADMIN account!

I’m in the middle of deploying WAC on my environment.

When WAC is installed I saw that I should use the account from Domain Admin groups – this group has full permissions on machines and is assigned to the local administrators group. You should not use any of domain admin account on a local workstation!

You should use an account that is on local administrators group!

But how to do this? Create an AD user and manually add it to the local administrators group? Boring!

Let’s use it for that GPO!

First I created a new OU on my domain, like on below screen, and moved Windows Servers computers to proper OU. Next – I created a new AD user named WacUser. When a user was created – I added it to a new group named: WACAdmins.

Windows Admin Center - without Domain Admin

When my OU is ready and I have a group and added WAC user to this group we can create a new GPO.

As you can see I will create it on WindowsServerDevices container.

Windows Admin Center - without Domain Admin

Let’s edit it and open Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Restricted Groups.

Now you can right-click and select Add group and provide the name of a group which you created earlier.

Windows Admin Center - without Domain Admin

When this group will show up you should type Administrators on the field: This group is member of like on below screen:

Windows Admin Center - without Domain Admin

Now you can go to your devices which are on WindowsServerDevices and do gpupdate /force from CMD with administrator privileges

When you open lusrmgr.msc and edit an Administrator group you should see:

Windows Admin Center - without Domain Admin

And it’s done. Nothing more. You’ve created a user without domain privileges to manage local workstations using WAC!

Jakub Piesik

Jakub Piesik

Microsoft 365 Consultant

I’m writing not only about Intune and Windows 365. I’m writing about everything what I leared previously and want to share with you!

#security #microsoft365 #intune #windows365 #powershell #automation 🙂