Securing Installation Images in Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

You might ask yourself: do you want everyone with an authorized computer to be able to access any installation image on your WDS server? Remember that some images might have specially licensed software. You cannot let that get out of control. It is possible to restrict access to installation images. That’s what I will look at now.

You can control witch domain-based groups (recommended) or user (not recommended) with have access to your installation image. You can do this for an image group (affecting all contained images) or for a specific installation image. You can access this dialog box by editing the properties of the image installation image, or by right-clicking on an image group and selecting Security.

By default, Authenticated Users has the following permissions on an installation image:

Read & Execute

Read

List Folder Contents

This means any domain-authenticated user can download and install those images on a computer that is authorized to use WDS. You can restrict access in either of the following ways: