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Minasi c01.tex V3 - 05/29/2008 9:45pm Page 14

14 CHAPTER 1 WHY NETWORK?

From mid 1996 to early 2000, no new versions of NT appeared, an ‘‘upgrade drought’’ such as

we’d not seen in quite some time from Microsoft. Then, in February 2000, Windows 2000 (‘‘NT

5.0’’) shipped. Windows 2000 included a whole lot of new stuff, but perhaps the most signiﬁcant

was a new way of storing and organizing user accounts and related information: Active Directory

(AD) domains. Closely following AD in importance was the then-new notion of Group Policy,

something you’ll see has become quite important to anyone wanting to run a network based on

XP and Server 2003.

The next version of NT shipped in pieces for the ﬁrst time since 1993. First NT Workstation

5.1 or, as it’s better known, XP Professional and its lesser sibling, XP Home. Microsoft intended

to follow up with the server version of NT 5.1, but events conspired to compel them to wait a

bit longer and produce NT Server 5.2 — that is, Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 is a

‘‘1.1’’ version of Windows 2000, a welcome improvement to 2000’s ﬁt and ﬁnish.

And now we reach Windows Server 2008, which builds a wealth of functionality onto the pre-

vious offerings. Of course, it now supports TCP/IPv6, which is an addition for the future. The

best news is that Windows Server 2008 provides signiﬁcant new security features. For example,

even the administrator doesn’t have access to the root directory, \Windows folder, or \Windows\

System32 folder, so trying to corrupt executables within these folders is signiﬁcantly more dif-

ﬁcult. The new Windows ﬁrewall provides both incoming and outgoing ﬁrewall support, so

outsiders will ﬁnd it much more difﬁcult to gain entry to your server, especially if you have other

ﬁrewalls in place. The administrator also runs as an average user now and must give permission to

perform certain tasks. This feature makes it much harder for an outsider to do something without

the administrator’s knowledge. In short, Windows Server 2008 is a welcome improvement to the

one issue that people complain about most — Windows security.

For those of you who fought through Windows network conﬁguration tasks in the past, you’ll

ﬁnd that Windows Server 2008 greatly automates the task. Microsoft has added functionality

that automatically detects your network card and begins the setup process for you as part of

the installation. In some cases, you might not need to do anything with the NIC or associated

connections at all except verify that your conﬁguration is correct. You don’t need to worry about

these details now. The next chapter shows how to put your network together, Chapter 3 reviews

Windows security, and you’ll see how to install Windows Server 2008 in Chapter 4.

Well, I hope this chapter wasn’t boring for those already expert in Windows while bringing the

newbies up to speed. No matter what version of Windows you’re running, however, you’ll need

to conﬁgure it. For example, Microsoft can’t guess about which resources, such as hard drives,

that you want to share, so the new automation can’t do everything for you. And there are, as there

always have been, two main ways to do it. The preferred way is through the GUI with windowed

programs that offer help and a bit of error-checking, or its somewhat more complex relatives, the

command-line tools. The less-preferred, but often necessary, way is to directly tweak some setting

in its lair ...a place called the Registry. The chapters that follow introduce these two conﬁguration

approaches.