I have recently installed a Windows 2008 Server and have joined 8 computers to its domain. The domain name is companyname.local. I set up user accounts in AD for each user, the user name being the same as the user name they have on each of their own computers.
One of the computers was new with Win 7 Pro and when I went to join it to the domain, it created a username.local folder in the Users folder on that computer. But when I joined all the other computers to the domain, no such folder was created in their respective Users folder, there was only a single folder for their username, no ".local" folder.
I am confused! Is the ".local" folder the one each user should have all their desktop, favourites etc settings in?
Also, I went to log onto one of the computers at the weekend to change some program settings, I didn't have the password for the user of that computer so I used my admin credentials to log on. I told the user to "switch user" to log back on with her own user name. This she did and instead of going into her usual desktop, a new desktop was created and I discovered that this had created a ".local" folder.
I realised that all the users are logging on with "localcomputername\username" as opposed to "domainname\username. I don't understand which of these is right and have not been able to clarify the situation through searching the Internet.