How to cross authenticate 2 win 2003 domains with one logon?

Question

I have a company that has one parent domain (dominos.com) and one child domain (pizza.dominos.com)

Now the parent domain dominos host all the server and services such as sharepoint, email, sql and everything else.

pizza.dominos.com host just a domain controller for the users in that piece of the organization.

Now over time the way all users have had to login into their local domain pizza.dominos.com was to use one user name and password. A duplicate had to be setup on the dominos.com server as well to host the email box and so on.

So the setup goes we have a set of user names on both domain controllers. And users have to login in both times.

I'm trying to find a way to have users logon to pizza.dominos.com and automatically cross authenticate to dominos.com and still get all their resources. Possibly eliminating the need for duplicate user names. We had done this because while we want all the users to get their services we don’t want them to actually login with their desktops to dominos.com, we want them to just get the services.

Hope that makes sense.

Answer 1

If you are talking about authenticating to web-based applications, you can use the Security tab in your Internet Options to set both domains as Local Intranet Domains

Answer 2

I'm assuming that both Dominos.com and Pizza.dominos.com are in the same forest in an Active directory. If that is not the case, you can create a trust in Active Directory Domains and Trusts MMC to give cross domain authentication.

If you have one forest with multiple domains, what you want to do is create a universal/global security group Pizza in your forest and grant access to resources in the pizza.dominos.com domain. Then move all of your pizza.dominos.com users in the dominos.com domain including their email mailboxes.  Add those users who need access to the pizza.dominos.com resources to the Pizza security group.  On each of the resources in the pizza.dominos.com domain, add the security group Pizza.