COMMAND

    install procedure

SYSTEMS AFFECTED

    Win2000

PROBLEM

    Ray  Atkinson  found  following.   He  recently  had  a hard drive
    failure which prompted a reload of  one of his servers.  Since  he
    had recently gotten the Windows  2000 resource kit, he decided  to
    try an  unattended (full)  setup from  CD.   This allowed  him the
    privilege to see  something he found  strange.  So  he ran through
    the wizard:

        set the admin password=*[ourpassword]#
        autologon=yes
        autlogoncount=1

    He  stuck  the  winnt.sif  onto  the  floppy, put the cdrom in and
    rebooted the  machine.   The machine  came back  up, we  installed
    active directory and rebooted the machine.  All the while thinking
    everything  was  great.   When  the  machine  came back up and his
    partner tried logging  on, it said  "The system could  not log you
    on..."

    What he  came to  find out  is that  our password  started with an
    asterisk (*) and  that the setup  did not bother  to look and  see
    whether or not that was all we had.  So, since a * tells setup  to
    make the password  null, it made  it null, regardless  of the fact
    that our password was 15 characters long.

SOLUTION

    Advice to you  scripters, for unattended  setup: either make  your
    first character  something other  then a  * or  keep in  mind that
    *anythingelse is still null.