Upgrading to Windows 2000

As everyone knows by now, Windows 2000 comes with a slew of new features over its predecessor Windows NT 4.0. However, in using these features on a stand-alone computer or in a network, you must meet several requirements. I'll give a few examples in sections below.

-- Windows 2000 comes with a new file system known as NTFS 5.0, which includes several enhancements over the previous version of NTFS. Three of the major improvements, in my opinion, are: Disk quotas, Dyanmic disks, and file encryption. Keep in mind in order to use all three preceding features, you must select the NTFS 5.0 file system during set-up (which MS recommends).

Disk Quotas: As the network administrator, you can set limits on the disk space that is available to a user. When the user riches the pre-set quota, then that user will receive a warning message that she or he is nearing his/her quota. As the Administrator you can increase the quota.

Dynamic Disks: In the past, if you ran out of disk space, you could delete old files, route users to a different server, or compress your drive. Then you had to wait until off-hours to add more disk space to the computer or server. However, with Dynamic Disks, you can add additional disk space (hard drives) to the server on the fly-- and it won't interrupt the activities of the network.

File Encryption: The EFS (Encrypting File System) feature allows you to encrypt files or entire directories, so if the files or directories are accessed by another user or group, then they must decrypt the files before reading its contents. File and directory encryption are NOT enabled automatically, therefore you must manually enable them yourself if you want to use the feature.

DDNS: In an IP network, computers are compromised of a name (computer name) and an IP address (eg. 200.2.35.40). In an NT 4.0 network, a WINS server was commonly used to map NetBIOS names into IP addresses. With the tight integration of DDNS and DHCP in Windows 2000, Administrators no longer have to manually update their DNS records. DDNS, when enabled on a Windows 2000 network, will dynamically update the tables.

Active Directory: Active Directory is equivalent to Novell's NDS (Novell Active Directory), but not quite exactly the same. Again, to take full advantage of Windows 2000's Active feature, your servers and clients should all be running Windows 2000 Professional and Server. For example, if your client is NOT running Windows 2000 Professional and your server IS running Windows 2000 Server, then you can only take advantage of Active Directory's basic features. Active Directory has 2 modes: Mixed-mode environment and Native mode. In order to EVERY advantage of AD, your clients and servers should all be Windows 2000. I can't get too deep into the features here, but Windows 2000's Active Directory includes many useful features.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic