Today I setup a custom service account on a WinServer 2003 box. I expected that it would be simple enough to enable “log on as a service” through the user properties dialog. Of course life is never that easy. Since the box was a domain controller, it turns out I needed to make this change via group policy.

It was one of those cases where I didn’t have quite the correct way of asking Bing/Google for the answer. If I had, then it would have led me to some very crisp instructions on technet (account “log on as service” gives this as the third hit on Bing/first hit on Google…<sigh>).