Creating a small login server

You can create a small windows 2000 domain.

Install windows 2000, make sure you install DNS from the networking components. After the installation is complete, make sure you assign this server a static IP address.

Next, configure DNS. Create a forward lookup zone, for example, school.local. Right-click on the zone, properties, enable Dynamic Updates.

Then, go to start, run, dcpromo. Upgrade the server to a domain controller. Reboot. Go into Active Directory Users and Computers. Create all the necessary user accounts in the Users container or create a new container.

Finally, configure each computer to join this domain.

Looks good. Haven't ever done it before, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Couple of questions though:

1. This makes it so that no one can log into windows on these machines unless they enter in a valid user name and password. Now, does every computer on the network have to do this, or can I set it so that only certain computers are in this domain? (This probably sounds really dumb, but I'm new to setting up this kind of stuff).

2. The main server doesn't assign an IP correct? The IP's are set on the client machines, but they get the IP from somewhere else, not the machine I'm setting up.

You don't have join all computers to the domain. The choice is yours how many are part of the domain. One thing you should know is that on computers that belong to the domain, it still is possible to log in only to that machine, rather than the domain.

What this means is, let's say someone doesn't have a user account created in Active Directory Users and Computers. However, they have a user account on the same machine they're using, then they can log into that machine.
This will not give them access to the whole domain, just that machine alone. Needed to make sure you were aware of that.

Regarding your 2nd question, like you said, the IP addresses for all your machines needs to come from somewhere. Now, there are two ways for a machine to get it. One is from an IP server, which is called a DHCP server, and the other way is to manually give each machine an address.

I did mention for your server, you have to give it a manual or static IP address. Regarding your workstations, it's up to you. In your case, since you're not very familiar with windows, and you only have 10 machines, I would recommend giving each machine a static IP, and keep it uniform, meaning machine 1 can be 192.168.0.100, the next one will be 192.168.0.101, etc. Make sure your server's IP address is also uniform 192.168.0.x. This way all machines will 'see' each other and you shouldn't have much problems.

Let me know if you have any other questions.