Testing DCOM with Windows NT 4.0

If you'll be carrying out testing on Windows NT 4.0 systems rather than Windows 95 systems, the following will be helpful in isolating some of the differences between the DCOM support on the two platforms. Some major differences between the two support platforms are:

Windows NT 4.0 has full launch and access security support (see Chapter 9 for more discussion on this topic).
Windows NT 4.0 offers automatic launch service.
Besides in-proc and local servers, Windows NT 4.0 also supports COM servers executing in the form of a native NT Service.

Make sure that you have Service Pack 2 installed on your system.

Dcomcnfg.exe

on Windows NT 4.0 will allow you to adjust the registry entries and security permissions, etc. You can continue to use Oleview.exe
in the Windows NT environment.

For our casual testing, we would like to disable the security and permission checking support. You can do this by setting the default values:

Default Authentication Level = None

Default Impersonation Level = Anonymous

This puts the system at the same level of accessibility as the Windows 95 machines.

One would never operate production systems in this state. However, a viable security policy requires careful planning before deployment. Again, see Chapter 9 for an in-depth discussion of security issues when working with Windows NT security in general, and DCOM security in particular.