Let’s join our Windows 10 computer to our saadz26.sg-host.com active directory domain. This way our users will be able to log on to that computer using their own domain account. We already have our Windows Server 2012 active directory installed and domain configured, and now we want to join our Windows 10 workstation to that domain.
In Windows 10, let’s right-click on Start and select the System option.
This will open basic system settings for our computer. Note the computer name and workgroup.
In our case, our computer name is something random. So, the first thing we will do is rename our computer to something more meaningful. To do that we can click on “Change settings”. The window will appear where we can enter new name for the computer (uw-w10 in our case). Note that you can skip renaming your computer if you are satisfied with the name.
Note that we will not join our computer to the domain just yet. When we click OK, we will get a warning that we have to restart our computer in order to change the name.
OK, after the restart, let’s check our computer name.
Let’s click on “Change settings” again, and this time join our computer to the domain. To do that, we will enter our domain name, which is saadz26.sg-host.com.
When we click OK, the system will ask us for credentials. Here we will enter credentials for user who have rights to add computer to the domain. In our case we will use domain administrator account.
If everything is OK, we will get a welcome message.
After this, we will again have to restart our computer.
In our previous article about directory services installation, we have created a Kim Verson user account. Since we have joined our Windows 10 workstation to that domain, we can now use Kim Verson domain account to log on to our Windows 10 machine. In fact, we can still use local account to log on, and also use domain account to log on to our Windows 10 machine, as we wish.
To log on using domain account, we simply choose “Other user” option and enter our domain user credentials.
Note that the “Sign in to: UTILIZEWINDOWS” is noted in this case, since our machine is joined to that domain.
Ok, if we go back to our Windows Server 2012 now, we can take a look at our computer objects.
We see that our new UW-W10 computer is now added to the Active Directory.