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Understanding rights

Rights are granted to users to define what a particular user is allowed to do on a system and to grant different levels of permission to different users. You can define rights for individual users, computers, and servers on your system. By default, Windows Media Services runs under the Network Service user account. This is a change from Windows Media Services version 4.1 in Windows 2000 Server. In that version, Windows Media Services created its own administrator account with administrator rights and permissions to access system resources.

The Network Service account is a predefined local account that first appeared in the Windows XP operating system. Services that are running under the Network Service account access network resources using the credentials of the computer account. The Network Service account has minimal privileges on the local computer. This prevents someone from using the account to gain access to protected resources on your system. The Network Service account does not have a password associated with it. If you change Windows Media Services to run under a different user account and then change it back to the Network Service account, do not enter a password.

Because Windows Media Services uses the Network Service account credentials to respond to authentication requests from other resources, ensure that the Network Service account has been granted the appropriate permissions in the access control lists of any resource with which it might interact. For example, if you are going to write log file information to a network location that is different from the default location, you must grant the appropriate permissions to the Network Service account for that location for Windows Media Services to write log files successfully.

Some plug-in features cannot interact with the Network Service account. For example, if you are going to use the Microsoft Script Debugger to troubleshoot script that will be run by the WMS Active Script Event Handler plug-in, you must configure Windows Media Services to run under another account.

Windows Server 2003 uses security templates to predefine the rights and permissions granted to users. When you review the security templates for your Windows Media server, be aware of the following:

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