Built-In Domain Level Groups dont have permissions on domain they should on 2012

Question

Hello,
First this is a brand new domain environment with everything running server 2012 datacenter edition.
Second I've never seen anything like the following occur in a domain environment. What I had is what appears to be a bad 2012 AD structure however so far all AD tests come back good. The problem is the built-in domain level groups do NOT offer any level
of access that they should. For example if I add a user in the administrators group, they don't have any permissions that group is supposed to have. THe same with every other builtin, backup operators, server operators, account operators and on and on. The
only way a user gets that level of access is if I add them into the domain admins group. As you can imagine this is crazy and not a solution for my help desk crew. (having them all be domain admins that is) So while I could very well use delegation, I need
to find out why my builtin groups don't function as they should.  Anyone have any ideas on what to check or where to look?  I'm at the point of opening a case with Microsoft on this.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Because those builtin groups AREN'T domain level groups in the way you're thinking. The Administrators group on the server gives users administrator permissions on the server, but that doesn't mean permissions on the entire domain.
If you look in the user list in ADUC you'll see that while Domain Admins are a Global security group, Administrators is only a local group, eg local to the server (or more accurately since they no longer have local details, to domain controllers), so doesn't
grant permissions to anything outside of the domain controller. On all non DC's the machines have their own local administrators group which is independent of the domain one, and can have different memberships.
So if you only need a user to have permissions to the DC then administrators is fine, but if you need them to have access to the entire network, eg other servers and workstations, then they need to be members of domain admins. If you only want them
to have limited permissions then you need to grant those permissions either via a global/universal group, or by adding them to the relevant local group on each machine they need access to.