Introduction
If you find yourself in a mixed environment that still includes Windows 9x and NT 4.0 computers mixed in with newer Windows 200, 2003, or 2008 servers, you will find that your legacy clients cannot login to the servers. Fortunately, your down-level clients can login to newer servers with an Active Directory client extension for older operating systems (Windows 9x and NT only) that will allow them to take advantage of some of the benefits of Active Directory. These benefits include:
NTLM Version 2 Authentication: Improved authentication features not available in NTLM version 1
Site Awareness: Includes the ability to log on to the nearest domain controller and the ability to change passwords on a domain controller.
AD Windows Address Book (WAB) property pages: Allows users who have permission to change properties on user objects (for example, phone number and address).
Support for distributed file system (DFS) fault tolerance features.
The Active Directory client for Windows 9x and Windows NT doesn't support all of the features found in Active Directory including the following:
Kerberos security
Group Policy or IntelliMirror
IPSec or L2TP
SPN or mutual authentication
Installation
Downloads and instructions can be found here.
Once you have located the software, double-click on the DSCLIENT.EXE which will launch the installation wizard. The installation is very self explanatory and does not have any configurable options to worry about. Once the installation has finished, you will be prompted to reboot your computer.
The most obvious difference that you will notice after installation are a couple of additions to the "find menu" located at Start->Find. After installing the client you will see "People" and "Printers" now listed as searchable options as shown below.
