Intlharvester

Speaking of GURUs, one thing that shocks me about NT Admin culture is how few people have read the Resource Kit (aka "the f*ing manual"). It's all in there, and usually in a format that that's better presented for real work than a book oriented towards gaining the subset of knowledge necessary for passing the MCSE tests. (OK, I don't do that work any more so I haven't read gigantic $300 2K bookshelf, but the 3.x books were quite good as with parts of the 4.0 set.)

QuickTime uses the Netscape-compatible plug-in interface (accessed by EMBED) which was supported by previous versions of IE. I suspect it's the same problem with BRIO, while Flash and so on are ActiveX plugins. It's unknown at this point if NS plugins will be supported in the final release or not.

As an aside, NT 3.50 didn't automatically grant domain users Interactive access. This meant that you couldn't just set up a machine and have any user sit down and logon without taking an extra step or two, so it's somewhat understandable why Microsoft made this change. Also, you could manage these 'ghost' groups from the user manager, instead of a seperate tool as with W2K.

If the second partition on the first disk (hd0b) is extended, make it a primary partition to get it detected as D:. (Although, I can't say why an extended partition would break the install.) You should be able to this from the 2000 installer, if not from XP.

If you aren't planning to boot off of the SCSI disks or use them from DOS, you might want to disable the controller BIOS. This should prevent them from getting detected ahead of the IDE disks. But, as mentioned, if you are doing a clean install, you can arrange drive letters to your hearts content (or even get rid of them and use a single rooted filesystem). One thing I learned the hard way is that installing NT into a extended partition and then adding/removing drives can lead to a system that doesn't want to boot without lots of cajoling.

"If s'kiddies didn't know, now they do, and if they could use the exploit, he'll show them how [he plans on making a program that will exploit the socket_raw implementation]. " The think about the "script kiddies" is that there's quite a few of them that know the system better than almost anyone. Raw socket attacks have been common in the Unix world for years, and they are coming to NT world whether Gibson shouts about it or not. It's not like the smarter kiddies don't have the Windows SDK sitting on their desktop. However, I think Microsoft's response is valid. Killing all the half-assedness of Win 9x was probably the best thing possible for computer security as a whole. Now all we need is an installer that creates power users and not administrators (see MacOS X which is targetted at an even more computer illiterate audience than Windows).

Just in case anyone missed it, exactly what hardware modification which will force re-activation is described in a paper at http://www.licenturion.com/xp/ (To the person who remove the SCSI card without having to reactivate, it sounds as if you added a different SCSI card, you would probably trip the mechanism.)

The advantages of W2K Advanced Server are (as far as I can tell): + Large memory (> 2GB) support + > 4 CPU support + Clustering support + Licencing hooks for certain products such as SQL 2000 Enterprise + It sounds kewler if you war?z AS I've also heard that AS runs with decreased performance if you have less than a gig of RAM. Can't verify that. Anyway, there's very little good reason to run Advanced Server over Server on standard types of hardware.

PCI can either be 32-bit or 64-bit AND 33Mhz or 66Mhz. The slots are backwards-compatible, but you do need to be somewhat careful how you mix cards. A pretty good explaination came up on groups.google: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=64-bit...d.earthlink.net The only time I think you actually need 64-bit or 66Mhz PCI is when you are doing 1000bt ethernet or big SCSI raid setups.

Hello -- I'm dumping my Matrox RRG due to the recent cancellation of the MJPEG drivers for W2K, so I'm looking for a replacement that has hardware assist, preferably MPEG. SHS -- you mention that Dazzle has bad support. Could you elaborate? How are the drivers? Any other options from a North American-based company?

Since he specifically mentioned compatibilty, I'd be careful with an AMD-based system. Not that there's anything wrong with AMD CPUs, just that the motherboard chipsets seem to have more problems under Win2000 than Intel ones. Just what I see posted. No flames from the AMD crowd please.

SHS - I don't get how you read that. Nvidia (not FiringSquad) says right out that they are not responsible for providing support for Voodoo. Drivers being a part of support. "Core Assets" probably is patents and the like, plus golden parachutes for 3dfx executives (but not the engineers!)

Note that Nvidia has nothing to do with Voodoo support and drivers. See http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/nvidia1215/ "FiringSquad: Will NVIDIA continue driver support for 3dfx's Voodoo 3,4,5 line? We're not purchasing 3dfx's current product line. We're only purchasing 3dfx's core assets. Support of 3dfx's current products will remain with 3dfx." Nvidia basically paid 3dfx to stop producing new cards. They did not purchase 3dfx.

For reference, see the HAL types in http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q234/5/58.ASP. Note that "ACPI UniProc" is actually a SMP board with 1 CPU installed. You can verify this by getting the old NT bootscreen with "/SOS /BOOTLOG" in the boot.ini. Ever case I've seen, multiproc boards are detected automatically, although I've never tried with a dual AMD...

In every case I've seen, W2K/NT detects SMP motherboards even if only 1 cpu is installed.

I wonder if the ODBC problem is related to the "Lotus Notes" problem in NT4 SP6 (which also killed some ODBC drivers for non-admins).

Here is the KB article which explains that Win9x/ME doesn't like more than 512MB: "Out of Memory" Error Messages with Large Amounts of RAM Installed - http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.ASP

Strange, I have timed large copies using NetBEUI versus NBT and NetBEUI was about 20% faster on an isolated LAN. Which makes sense because it's a simplier protocol with less overhead. Now, that was NT 4, single CPU, and there was no broadcast traffic to speak of, which pretty much reflects a home network only. But if ain't broke, don't fix it, and NetBEUI ain't any more broke now than when MS was pushing it back in the 80s. Besides, if MS is trying to "improve user experience" by screwing downlevel clients, it would be nice if they went all the way with pure NTLMv2 and killed all the old LanMan crap along with NetBeui. (The "pure AD" comment was pointed at known issues with lanman domain controller replicaiton and browse masters. I believe there's also some RPC DoS attacks that can be executed as an unprivledged user. Don't want to be the guy who finds out, so I say firewall.)

The scrollbars aren't native widgets, which is why a page author can skin them with CSS. Agreed that the default should look right.

True, but at the cost of back-compat and some administrative conveience. I wouldn't consider an SMB network to be really secure unless it's pure-ActiveDirectory and the machines have been locked down. And even then, you might be the first on your block to discover something (most existing old style-SMB hacks have been known for many years). Unless you feel that you've got a real solid understanding of SMB (using materials other than MS's documentation), I would treat it as 'cleartext' protocol much like FTP and firewall it away to your LAN. The XP firewall is a good step, but only if it blocks SMB ports on the Internet side _by default_ in the home internet config. It would be much better if XP Home shipped with only NetBeui bound to the MS Networking stuff, and the assumption that TCP/IP was for untrusted Internet connections. Most home users can't and won't be bothered to change this stuff.

"NetBIOS in WIn2k/NT and XP I would imagine is fully secur_able_." Which is not the same thing as secure. In fact, out of box 2K (and I imagine XP) will happily accept unencrypted logins and broadcast all sorts of interesting information to anonymous connections. It needs to do this or back-compatibility breaks. Just because retarded 'share' passwords aren't used doesn't make it secure by any means -- at it's core it's still an 1980s-era trusted LAN protocol. NetBIOS/SMB is only secure if it's firewalled away. NetBEUI does that for you automatically by being non-routable.

Reasons for using NetBEUI: 1) Networking with DOS machines (how I use it - TCP/IP eats too much memory). 2) It's really fast on single-segment LANs. Getting rid of it for no good reason would be a rather unfortunate event. Is this in XP Pro or just XP Home?

Startup Control Panel (http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml) is a nice interface to the registry Run keys.

What it's trying to tell you is that if your main boot drive dies, you will need to alter the boot.ini file (on c to boot from the mirror drive. The resource kit (at least for NT4) had a description of the process.

Outlook 2000 adds an icon for a news-only version of Outlook express. The command line is "D:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe" /outnews You should be able to set your newsreader and mailreader independantly in the Internet control panel.