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I am providing laptop support to a user in another state. I'd hate for the user to have to ship the laptop back just for me to login and create a local profile for the user. The OS is Windows 7 and I thought I already created them a local profile by simply logging in as them on our network. Apparently I did not create the profile if it is not working. The problem is, when they are prompted to login, they receive the error "there are currently no logon servers available". Is there a way to login with the local administrator profile, that should already be on the laptop, and create a new profile for themselves, logout as admin, then log back in using the new profile created so they can vpn into our network?

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    Has the user changed their password since you logged on to the laptop as them? And are they logging in using the same format of username as you did? By which I mean - when you logged on as them, did you do it as "DOMAIN\username", and perhaps they are logging in as "username@domain"? This sounds like the user has changed their password between you setting up the laptop, and them receiving it. Obviously, the laptop is not aware of this password change, so it considers the new password to be wrong, and attempts to find a domain controller to verify it, and then fails with "no logon servers" Dec 19, 2014 at 16:19
  • Thank you. Excellent point. I tried having them login with the domain\username too and still they are unable to get in. Yes they did change the password but I told them to login as the old password and still they are unable to get in.
    – userDev
    Dec 19, 2014 at 16:27

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If the following is true:

  1. You can successfully log on the laptop with administrative privileges (doesn't matter if you do this with a local or domain user account)
  2. Your domain network is configured to accept a VPN connection

...then you can create a VPN connection that can be established prior to user logon in order to provide your user with connectivity to a Domain Controller so that they can logon with their domain profile. To do so:

  1. Logon the laptop with admin rights
  2. Create a VPN connection back to your domain network.
  3. When creating the VPN connection, enable the Allow other people to use this connection option as shown here. This will make the connection available from the Windows logon screen. enter image description here
  4. Log off the laptop
  5. At the Windows logon screen, click the VPN connection icon and connect to the VPN using valid credentialsenter image description here
  6. Your user can now log on using whatever credentials your domain controller considers valid for them.

Further, if the security policy Interactive logon: Number of previous logons to cache (in case domain controller is not available) has not been changed from the default which allows the last 10 successful domain user logons to log on a machine without connectivity to a DC, then once you successfully complete the above your user will be able to logon the laptop in the future without having to establish a VPN connection first.

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