Big Brother

Authoritarianism, referred to as "Big Brother", any omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individual lives exerted by an authoritarian government, a concept from the above novel. Those operating systems that can be upgraded in this process must be running a version of Windows that can be upgraded (Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4, Windows 98 and Windows 95 OSR2.x) and those versions must be running the SMS client agent that can receive software installation operations. Big Brother (1984), a character from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Systems Management Server can be used to upgrade system to Windows 2000 to multiple systems. If a system has different HALs, mass storage devices or ACPI support, then multiple images would need to be maintained. The primary reason for using Sysprep is for deploying Windows 2000 to a site that has standard hardware and that needs a fast method of installing Windows 2000 to those computers.

This means that all applications and system configuration settings will be copied across to the new Windows 2000 installations, but it also means that the reference and target computers must have the same HALs, ACPI support, and mass storage devices — though Windows 2000 automatically detects plug and play devices. Sysprep allows the duplication of a disk image on an existing Windows 2000 Server installation to multiple servers. The Winnt.exe program must also be passed a /unattend switch that points to a valid answer file and a /s file to point to the location of one or more valid installation sources. The hard drive does not need to be in the target computer and may be swapped out to it at any time, with hardware configuration still needing to be done later.

The Syspart method is started on a standardised reference computer — though the hardware need not be similar — and it copies the required installation files from the reference computer's hard drive to the target computer's hard drive. Unattended installations can be performed via a bootable CD, using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), via the System Preparation Tool (Sysprep), via running the Winnt32.exe program using the /syspart switch or via running the Remote Installation Service (RIS). The Winnt.exe or Winnt32.exe program then uses that answer file to automate the installation. Unattended installations are scripted via an answer file, or predefined script in the form of an INI file that has all the options filled in already.

An attended installation requires the manual intervention of an operator to choose options when installing the operating system. Installations can be attended or unattended. It can be installed onto servers via traditional media (such as via CD) or via distribution folders that reside on a shared folder. Windows 2000 can be deployed to a site via various methods.

It also supports failover and load balancing. ^[12] A limited edition 64 bit version of Windows 2000 Advanced Server was made available via the OEM Channel. It released Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows Datacenter Server:. Microsoft released various versions of Windows 2000 to cater to different markets and business needs.

The types supported are mirrored volumes and RAID-5 volumes:. Along with support for simple, spanned and striped volumes, the server family of Windows 2000 also supports fault tolerant volume types. It also requires that one or more domain controllers exist to hold the Active Directory database and provide Active Directory directory services. It requires that a DNS service that supports SRV resource records be installed, or that an existing DNS infrastructure be upgraded to support this functionality.

Active Directory can only be installed on a Windows 2000 Server, Advanced Server or Datacenter Server computer, and cannot be installed on a Windows 2000 Professional computer. Groups of trees that do not exist within the same namespace can be linked together to form forests. Active Directory can organise groups of resources into a single domain and can link domains into a contiguous domain name space together to form trees. Active Directory Networks can vary from a small installation with a few hundred objects, to a large installation with millions of objects.

This allows all of the information and computer settings about an organization to be stored in a central, organized database. Active Directory stores information about its users and can act in a similar manner to a phone book. Active Directory allows administrators to assign enterprise wide policies, deploy programs to many computers, and apply critical updates to an entire organization, and is one of the main reasons why many corporations have moved to Windows 2000. ^[11].

The file and root information is replicated via the Microsoft File Replication Service (FRS). DFS roots that exist on a domain must be hosted on a domain controller or on a domain member server. Domain-based DFS roots exist within Active Directory and can have their information distributed to other domain controllers within the domain — this provides fault tolerance to DFS. Standalone DFS allows for only DFS roots that exist on the local computer, and thus does not use Active Directory.

There can be two ways of implementing DFS on Windows 2000: through standalone DFS, or through domain-based DFS. A DFS root can only exist on a Windows 2000 version that is part of the server family, and only one DFS root can exist on that server. When users try to access a share that exists off the DFS root, the user is really looking at a DFS link and the DFS server transparently redirects them to the correct file server and share. The Distributed File System, or DFS, allows shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, or DFS root.

They all have advanced functionality not found in Windows 2000 Professional, among these features are support for DFS, Active Directory and advanced fault-tolerant volumes. The Windows 2000 server family consists of Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. The console can be accessed in one of two ways:. The commands are limited to ones for checking and repairing the hard drive(s), repairing boot information (including NTLDR), replacing corrupted system files with fresh copies from the CD, or enabling/disabling services and drivers for the next boot.

It presents itself as a simple command line interface. It is usually used, however, to recover the system from errors causing booting to fail, which would render other tools useless. The Recovery Console is an application that is run from outside the installed copy of Windows and that enables a user to perform maintenance tasks that cannot be run from inside of the installed copy, or cannot be feasibly run from another computer or copy of Windows 2000. ^[10].

It can also repopulate and repair all the files in the Dllcache folder. It is a command line utility that scans system files and verifies whether they were signed by Microsoft and works in conjunction with the Windows File Protection mechanism. The System File Checker (SFC) also comes bundled with Windows 2000. Windows XP was the first system to integrate these two programs into one, adopting the REGEDIT.EXE behavior with the additional NT functionality.

Therefore, the only way to access the full functionality of an NT registry was with REGEDT32.EXE, which uses the older multiple document interface (MDI), which newer versions of regedit do not use. Because REGEDIT.EXE was directly ported from Windows 98, it does not support permission editing (permissions do not exist in Windows 9x). REGEDT32.EXE was also written for the Win32 API and requires all actions to be performed from the top menu bar. REGEDIT.EXE was written for the Win32 API and supports right-clicking of entries in a tree view to adjust properties and other settings.

REGEDT32.EXE represents them as a list of strings. REGEDIT.EXE represents the three components of a value (its name, type, and data) as separate columns of a table. REGEDT32.EXE has a left-side tree view, but each hive has its own window, so the tree displays only keys. REGEDIT.EXE has a left-side tree view that begins at "My Computer" and lists all loaded hives.

One acts like the Windows 9x REGEDIT.EXE program and the other could edit registry permissions in the same manner that Windows NT's REGEDT32.EXE program could. Windows 2000 comes bundled with two utilities to edit the Windows registry. Lastly, it also contains a services viewer, which allows users to view all installed services and to stop and start them on demand, as well as configure what those services should do when the computer starts. It also contains a disk management snap-in, which contains a disk defragmenter as well as other disk management utilities.

This contains the event viewer — a means of seeing events and the Windows equivalent of a log file, a system information viewer, the ability to view open shared folders and shared folder sessions, a device manager and a tool to view all the local users and groups on the Windows 2000 computer. The main tools that come with Windows 2000 can be found in the Computer Management console (found in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel). ^[9]. User mode consoles can have full access granted user so they can make whatever changes they desire, can have limited access so that users cannot add to the console but they can view multiple windows in a console, or they can have limited access so that users cannot add to the console and also cannot view multiple windows in a console.

User mode allows consoles to be distributed with restrictions applied. Author mode allows snap-ins to be added, new windows to be created, all portions of the console tree can be displayed and for consoles to be saved. In order to provide the ability to control what snap-ins can be seen in a console, the MMC allows consoles to be created in author mode or created in user mode. Snap-ins can be either standalone (performs one function), or extensions (adds functionality to an existing snap-in).

Each console can contain one or many specific administrative tools, called snap-ins. Each of the tools is called a console, and most consoles allow an administrator to administer other Windows 2000 computers from one centralised computer. Windows 2000 introduced the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), which is used to create, save, and open administrative tools. ^[8] It also has support for many different locales, a list of which can be found on Microsoft's website.

It supports Arabic, Armenian, Baltic, Central European, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Indic, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkic, Vietnamese and Western European languages. Windows 2000 has support for many languages other than English. They included several utilities designed to make the system more accessible:. Microsoft made an effort to increase the usability of Windows 2000 for people with visual and auditory impairments and other disabilities.

Windows 2000 also added support for iSCSI protocol. All versions of Windows 2000 support three types of dynamic disk volumes (along with basic storage): simple volumes, spanned volumes and striped volumes:. Windows 2000 introduced the Logical Disk Manager for dynamic storage. ^[7] Also, in case of a user losing access to their key, support for recovery agents that can decrypt files has been built in to the EFS system.

Because this is done at the file system level, it is transparent to the user. It then uses the symmetric key to decrypt the file. To decrypt the file, the file system uses the private key of the user to decrypt the symmetric key that is stored in the file header. The symmetric key that is used to encrypt the file is then encrypted with a public key that is associated with the user who encrypted the file, and this encrypted data is stored in the header of the encrypted file.

EFS works by encrypting a file with a bulk symmetric key (also known as the File Encryption Key, or FEK), which is used because it takes a relatively smaller amount of time to encrypt and decrypt large amounts of data than if an asymmetric key cipher is used. As of February 2004, its encryption has not been compromised. EFS works in conjunction with the EFS service, Microsoft's CryptoAPI and the EFS File System Run-Time Library (FSRTL). It allowed any folder or drive on an NTFS volume to be encrypted transparently to the end user.

The Encrypting File System (EFS) introduced strong encryption into the Windows file world. Volume mount points and directory junctions allow for a file to be transparently referred from one file or directory location to another. Reparse points are used to implement Volume Mount Points, Directory Junctions, Hierarchical Storage Management, Native Structured Storage and Single Instance Storage. Reparse points allow the object manager to reset a file namespace lookup and let file system drivers implement changed functionality in a transparent manner.

Sparse files allow for the efficient storage of data sets that are very large yet contain many areas that only have zeroes. Microsoft released the third version of the NT File System (NTFS) — also known as version 5.0 — in Windows 2000; this introduced quotas, file-system-level encryption (called EFS), sparse files and reparse points. In order to improve performance on computers running Windows 2000 as a server operating system, Microsoft gave administrators the choice of optimising the operating system for background services or for applications. Users have the option of dumping the first 64KB of memory to disk (the smallest amount of memory that is useful for debugging purposes, also known as a minidump), a dump of only the kernel's memory or a dump of the entire contents of memory to disk, as well as write that this event happened to the Windows 2000 event log.

^[6] Microsoft recognised that the infamous Blue Screen of Death (or stop error) could cause serious problems for servers that needed to be constantly running and so provided a system setting that would allow the server to automatically reboot when a stop error occurred. This prevents programs (with the exception of Microsoft's update programs) from replacing critical Windows system files and thus making the system inoperable. As well as these features, Microsoft introduced a new feature to protect critical system files, called Windows File Protection (WFP). Windows 2000 also has several standard system utilities included as standard.

Certain features are common across all versions of Windows 2000 (both Professional and the Server versions), among them being NTFS 5, the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), the Encrypting File System (EFS), dynamic and basic disk storage, usability enhancements and multi-language and locale support. The lowest level drivers are either legacy Windows NT device drivers that control a device directly or can be a PnP hardware bus. The Windows Driver Model (WDM) exists in the intermediate layer and was mainly designed to be binary and source compatible between Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Kernel mode drivers exist in three levels: highest level drivers, intermediate drivers and low level drivers.

^[5] The microkernel is also responsible for initialising device drivers at bootup that are necessary to get the operating system up and running. The microkernel often interfaces with the process manager. The microkernel sits between the HAL and the executive and provides multiprocessor synchronization, thread and interrupt scheduling and dispatching, trap handling and exception dispatching. The HAL includes hardware specific code that controls I/O interfaces, interrupt controllers and multiple processors.

It was designed to hide differences in hardware and therefore provide a consistent platform to run applications on. The Windows 2000 Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL, is a layer between the physical hardware of the computer and the rest of the operating system. It contains various components, including:. It deals with I/O, object management, security and process management.

The executive interfaces with all the user mode subsystems. The kernel mode stops user mode services and applications from accessing critical areas of the operating system that they should not have access to. Kernel mode in Windows 2000 has full access to the hardware and system resources of the computer. It consists of a security subsystem (grants/denies access and handles logons), workstation service (helps the computer gain network access) and a server service (lets the computer provide network services).

The integral subsystem looks after operating system specific functions on behalf of the environment subsystem. There are three main environment subsystems:. These applications, however, run at a lower priority than kernel mode processes. The environment subsystem was designed to run applications written for many different types of operating systems.

Two subsystems make up the user mode layer of Windows 2000: the environment subsystem and the integral subsystem. User mode in Windows 2000 is made of subsystems capable of passing I/O requests to the appropriate kernel mode drivers by using the I/O manager. All user mode applications access system resources through the executive which runs in kernel mode. Such programs are limited in terms of what system resources they have access to, while the kernel mode has unrestricted access to the system memory and external devices.

The user mode refers to the mode in which user programs are run. Windows 2000 is a highly modular system that consists of two main layers: a user mode and a kernel mode. The worms have also had political consequences as many companies in several countries started to call for government action to prevent further damages from Windows worms. In August 2003, two major worms named the Sobig worm and the Blaster worm began to attack millions of Microsoft Windows computers, resulting in the largest down-time and clean-up cost ever.

Code Red and Code Red II were famous (and highly visible to the worldwide press) computer worms that exploited vulnerabilities of the indexing service of Windows 2000's Internet Information Services (IIS). Several notable security flaws have been found in Windows 2000. The only elements of the Windows project which were included in Windows 2000 were the ability to upgrade from Windows 95 or Windows 98, and support for the FAT32 file system. Windows Me was released as a substitute, and the Neptune project was forwarded to the production of Whistler (Windows XP).

However, the project lagged in production time – and only one alpha release was built. Windows Neptune started development in 1999, and was supposed to be the home-user edition of Windows 2000. Microsoft has replaced Windows 2000 Server products with Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 Professional with Windows XP Professional. Windows 2000 has since been superseded by newer Microsoft operating systems.

Microsoft phased out all development of their Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from Windows 2000 in Service Pack 3. Microsoft has stated that they will not release a Service Pack 5, but instead, have offered an "Update Rollup" for Service Pack 4. Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) on August 15, 2000, Service Pack 2 (SP2) on May 16, 2001, Service Pack 3 (SP3) on August 29, 2002 and its last Service Pack (SP4) on June 26, 2003. ^[3] On September 29, 2000, Microsoft released Windows 2000 Datacenter.

Novell, however, was not so impressed with Microsoft's new directory service architecture as they found it to be less scalable or reliable than their own Novell Directory Services (NDS) technology. ^[2] The public received the full version of Windows 2000 on February 17, 2000 and the press immediately hailed it as the most stable operating system Microsoft had ever released. From here Microsoft issued three release candidates from between July to November 1999 and finally released the operating system to partners on December 12, 1999. The first beta for Windows 2000 was released on September 27, 1997 and several further betas were released until Beta 3 which was released on April 29, 1999.

^[1] It was also the first Windows version that was released without a code name, though Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 was codenamed "Asteroid" and Windows 2000 64-bit was codenamed "Janus" (not to be confused with Windows 3.1, which had the same codename). Originally called Windows NT 5, Microsoft changed the name to Windows 2000 on October 27th, 1998. Windows 2000 originally descended from the Microsoft Windows NT operating system product line. .

Unattended installations rely on the use of answer files to fill in installation information, and can be performed through a bootable CD using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), by the System Preparation Tool (Sysprep). Windows 2000 can be installed and deployed to an enterprise through either an attended or unattended installation. The Windows 2000 Server family has enhanced functionality, including the ability to provide Active Directory services (a hierarchical framework of resources), Distributed file system (a file system that supports sharing of files) and fault-redundant storage volumes. Dynamic disk storage allows different types of volumes to be used.

All versions of the operating system support the Windows NT filesystem, NTFS 5, the Encrypted File System (EFS), as well as basic and dynamic disk storage. Support for people with disabilities has also been improved by Microsoft across their Windows 2000 line, and they have included increased support for different languages and locale information. All versions of Windows 2000 have common functionality, including many system utilities such as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and standard system management applications such as a disk defragmentation utility. The kernel mode provides unrestricted access to system resources and facilitates the user mode, which is heavily restricted and designed for most applications.

Windows 2000 is classified as a hybrid-kernel operating system, and its architecture is divided into two modes: user mode and kernel mode. Additionally, Microsoft offers Windows 2000 Advanced Server- Limited Edition, which released in 2001 and runs on 64-bit Intel Itanium microprocessors. Windows 2000 comes in four versions: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server. It is part of the Microsoft Windows NT line of operating systems and was released on February 17, 2000.

Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K, W2K or Windows NT 5.0) is a preemptible and interruptible, graphical, business-oriented operating system that was designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor (SMP) 32-bit Intel x86 computers. Approximately 1 GB of available disk space. 256 MB of RAM - up to 64 GB is supported in one machine. A Pentium-class CPU at 400 MHz or higher - up to 32 are supported in one machine.

Its system requirements are normal, but are compatible with vast amounts of power: