they’re learning. I don’t know if Pocket PC will beat PalmOS—as a long-time Palm user, I tend to think not—but they’ll definitely steal more of PalmOS’s market share with Pocket PC than they ever did with Windows CE.
And while Microsoft’s detractors like to paint Microsoft as nothing but a bunch of rip-off artists, it’s actually hard to find who originated these ideas. Some say that Microsoft stole Novell and Apple’s best ideas; well, Novell certainly didn’t invent networking, and their IPX/SPX protocol is blatant “theft” of a Xerox protocol. Apple didn’t invent the GUI that Microsoft supposedly stole—Xerox did. (Hmmm, maybe there’s a pattern here.) Nor is Active Directory a rip-off of an original Novell product, Netware Directory Services—NDS is based on a directory standard called X.500 and terms that many people think that Novell invented, like “organizational unit,” are X.500 terms. In any case, it is something of a comfort for people to be able to buy a single product that is a decent fit for just about all of their networking needs, instead of looking for the best of breed in each area. Why? Anyone who’s ever tried to troubleshoot a multivendor network problem knows why: Both vendors just point the finger at the other vendor and say, “That’s him—he’s the guy causing your problem.” (They’re hoping you’ll get tired and go away. Most of us do, sadly.)
In contrast, the same people are developing all of 2003’s pieces; so you have to believe that at some point someone would have noticed if they didn’t fit together. Or that if someone didn’t notice it before they shipped, they’ll get around to fixing it afterward.
In sum, why use 2003? It’s fairly reliable, it does most of what you want a network operating system to do, it’s reasonably priced, and enough other people use it that you’re probably not going to go terribly wrong.
A Brief History of NT
Let’s finish this chapter with a look at how NT has grown and changed since its early days. Even in the early 1980s, Bill Gates knew that networking was a key to owning the computer business. So, on April 15, 1985, Microsoft released its first networking product, a tool called MS-NET, and its companion operating system, DOS 3.10. Most people knew about the new DOS and were puzzled at its apparent lack of new features. What it contained, however, were architectural changes to DOS that made it a bit friendlier to the idea of networks.
Now, Microsoft wasn’t big enough at that time to create much hoopla about a new network operating system, so they let others sell it—no matter how high or low you looked, you couldn’t buy a product called MS-NET. Instead, it sold mainly as an IBM product under the name of the IBM PC Network Support Program; IBM viewed it as little more than some software to go along with their PC Net- work LAN boards and, later, their Token Ring cards. The server software was DOS-based, offered minimal security, and, to be honest, performed terribly. (Believe me, I know; I used to install them for people.) But the software had two main effects on the market.
First, the fact that IBM sold a LAN product legitimized the whole industry. IBM made it possible for others to make a living selling network products. And that led to the second effect: the growth of Novell. Once IBM legitimized the idea of a LAN, most companies responded by going out and getting the LAN operating system that offered the best bang for the buck. That was an easy decision: NetWare. In the early days of networking, Novell established itself as the performance leader. You could effectively serve about twice as many workstations with Novell NetWare as you could with any of the MS-NET products. So Novell prospered.
42 CHAPTER 2 THE BASICS: NETWORKING SOFTWARE, SERVERS, AND SECURITY
As time went on, however, Microsoft got better at building network products. 3Com, wanting to offer a product that was compatible with the IBM PC Network software, licensed MS-NET and resold it as their 3+ software. 3Com knew quite a bit about networking, however, and recognized the limitations of MS-NET. So 3Com reworked MS-NET to improve its performance, a fact that didn’t escape Microsoft’s attention.
From 1985 to 1988, Microsoft worked on their second generation of networking software. The software was based on their OS/2 version 1 operating system. (Remember, Microsoft was the main driving force behind OS/2 from 1985 through early 1990. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s number two guy, promised publicly in 1988 that Microsoft would “go the distance with OS/2.” Hey, the world changes and you’ve got to change with it, right?) Seeing the good work that 3Com did with MS-NET, Microsoft worked as a partner with 3Com to build the next generation of LAN software. Called Microsoft LAN Manager, this network server software was built atop the more powerful OS/2 operating system. As with the earlier MS-NET, Microsoft’s intention was never to directly market LAN Manager. Instead, they envisioned IBM, 3Com, Compaq, and others selling it.
IBM did indeed sell LAN Manager (they still do in the guise of OS/2 LAN Server). 3Com sold LAN Manager for years as 3+Open but found little profit in it and got out of the software business. In late 1990, Compaq announced that they would not sell LAN Manager because it was too complex a product for their dealers to explain, sell, and support. Microsoft decided then that if LAN Manager was to be sold, they’d have to do the selling, so on the very same day as the Compaq withdrawal, they announced that they would begin selling LAN Manager directly.
Note Interesting side note: Ten years after Compaq decided that their sales force couldn’t sell network software, they reversed direction and said that they’d sell a special version of Windows 2000 called Datacenter Server. It’s special because you cannot buy it from Microsoft—you must buy it preinstalled on specially certified vendor hardware. In other words, the hardware vendors (Compaq’s not the only one selling Datacenter) now believe that they can sell complex network operating systems. I wish them the best of luck, but stay tuned to see the outcome of this particular marketing maneuver!
LAN Manager in its first incarnation still wasn’t half the product that Novell NetWare was, but it was getting there. LAN Manager 2 greatly closed the gap, and in fact, on some benchmarks LAN Manager outpaced Novell NetWare. Additionally, LAN Manager included administrative and security features that brought it even closer to Novell NetWare in the minds of many network managers. Slowly, LAN Manager gained about a 20 percent share of the network market.
When Microsoft designed LAN Manager, however, they designed it for the 286 chip (more accurately, I should say again that LAN Manager was built atop OS/2 1.x, and OS/2 1.x was built for the 286 chip). LAN Manager’s 286 foundation hampered its performance and sales. In contrast, Novell designed their premier products (NetWare 3 and 4) to use the full capabilities of the 386 and later processors. Microsoft’s breakup with IBM delayed the release of a 386-based product and, in a sense, Microsoft never released the 386-based product.
Instead of continuing to climb the ladder of Intel processor capabilities, Microsoft decided to build a processor-independent operating system that would sit in roughly the same market position as Unix. It could then be implemented for the 386 and later chips, and it also could run well on other processors, such as the PowerPC, Alpha, and MIPS chips. Microsoft called this new operating system NT, for new technology. Not only would NT serve as a workstation operating system, it would also
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NT 43
arrive in a network server version to be called LAN Manager NT. No products ever shipped with that name, but the wallpaper that NT Server displays when no one is logged in is called LANMANNT.BMP to this day.
In August 1993, Microsoft released LAN Manager NT with the name NT Advanced Server. In a shameless marketing move, they labeled it version 3.1 in order to match the version numbers of the Windows desktop products. This first version of NT Advanced Server performed quite well. However, it was memory-hungry, lacked Novell connectivity, and had only the most basic TCP/IP connectivity.
September 1994 brought a new version and a new name: Microsoft Windows NT Server version 3.5. Version 3.5 was mainly a “polish” of 3.1; it was less memory-hungry, it included Novell and TCP/IP connectivity right in the box, and it included Windows for Workgroups versions of the administrative tools so network administrators could work from a Workgroup machine rather than an NT machine. Where many vendors would spend 13 months adding silly bells and whistles, NT 3.5 showed that the Microsoft folks had spent most of their time fine-tuning the operating system, trimming its memory requirements, and speeding it up.
In October 1995 came NT version 3.51, which mainly brought support for PCMCIA cards (a real boon for us traveling instructor types), file compression, and a raft of bug fixes.
NT version 4, 1996’s edition of NT, got a newer Windows 95–like face and a bunch of new features, but no really radical networking changes. Under the hood, NT 4 wasn’t much different from NT 3.51.
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. 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 domains. Closely following AD in importance was the then-new notion of group policies, something that 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. As you read in the last chapter, it’s a “1.1” version of Windows 2000, a welcome improvement to 2000’s fit and finish.
That’s not the end of the story for NT. Sometime in 2004 or 2005, we will see a re-unified NT (5.3? 6.0? Time will tell) code-named Longhorn. That in turn will pave the way for yet another version of NT, code-named Blackcomb, but let’s wait for another edition or two of this book to cover that product.
Well, I hope this chapter wasn’t boring for those already expert in NT—I did warn you!—and helped bring the newbies up to speed. No matter what version of NT you’re running, however, you’ll need to configure it. 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 next two chapters introduce these two configuration approaches.