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| �In My Opinion....... Windows 2000 - Can You Survive Without Training? I have been in the IT industry for some 20 years now, and have done everything from mainframe operations, through the usual programmer, programmer/analyst, analyst/programmer, systems analyst, business analyst roles, finishing up as Group IT Manager for a large global manufacturing concern.� In 1991 I gave all this up for the exciting world of running my own company - an independent test lab, where every day is Christmas day for the technology geek. I get to play with all sorts of exciting hardware and software, much of which I write about for the computer press.� I have been involved in the beta programs of Novell NetWare and NDS, and have been playing extensively with NT Server since it crawled from the primordial slime as OS/2, and eventually evolved (if that is the right word) into LAN Manager and the early versions of NT. As Microsoft and IBM went their separate ways I continued to follow NT through all its releases and have been playing seriously with Windows 2000 since Beta 2. I do not consider myself a stupid person and, all modesty aside, I feel that I know a fair bit about networking in general. Why am I telling you all this? Tooting my own horn? Blowing my own trumpet? Not a bit of it. I am trying to illustrate that I am no networking neophyte, so that you will sit up and take notice when I tell you that Windows 2000 is not so much an evolution, as a stonking great “meteorite from the heavens - great clouds of dust wiping all traces of NT from the planet leaving us with a completely new life-form” type of event. And I only realised that – really realised it, that is - last week! Of course, Microsoft will not dare admit this to you, the potential purchaser. It will have sat back and watched Novell shoot itself in the foot with both barrels after the release of NetWare 4.0 and NDS. “Oh no, NetWare 4 is not for the hoi polloi”, they cried. “NetWare 4 is for the Enterprise – NetWare 3 is for the SME, and for the entry level, we have NetWare Lite”. This convoluted partitioning of the market place served only to confuse the issue, and sales of NetWare 4 suffered as a result. Microsoft will not be keen to repeat the fiasco. This means that it will not go out of its way to tell you the unpalatable truth – that Windows 2000 is quite a different beast to NT4. This is not apparent from the various migration and upgrade documents you see flying around at present, where it looks like all you have to do is slide in the CD and press the “YES” button to upgrade. Actually, that is all you have to do, but the results may be somewhat sub-optimal. For instance, anyone using a multi-master domain model under NT4 will find a similar structure created under NT5. “So what’s the problem?”, I hear you ask. Well the problem is that people have implemented multiple domains for many reasons over the years, and most of those reasons have been to do with technical limitations of the NT domain model in general. These are hopefully about to disappear – and I would venture to suggest that the vast majority of companies would be best advised to adopt a single domain under Windows 2000. Windows 2000 and Active Directory finally gives us the option to create a single domain for our entire organisation. Administration issues can be handled admirably using Organisational units and Group Policies, whilst physical partitioning of the domain is handled by the concept of sites – very similar, in fact, to how Exchange Server does it (surprise, surprise). Unfortunately, there is no automated way to move from a multiple domain model to a single domain. Instead, you need to sit down and design your network from scratch, and then set about collapsing your domain structure prior to upgrading (there are third party tools such as DM/Suite from FastLane Inc designed to help you with just this task). In other words, you should not blindly move from NT4 to Windows 2000 and trust that your network will be optimised. Chances are you will have a hell of a lot of tidying up to do afterwards. This all came to light on a training course I attended last week at Global Knowledge in London entitled “Upgrading Support Skills From NT4 To Windows 2000”. As the course progressed, I quickly began to realise that this, and the course on Active Directory design, are not just useful, but downright essential. Once you start creating multiple sites or multiple domains, how should things be arranged for optimal performance and fault tolerance? How much do you know about DNS (plenty, I hope, since Active Directory relies on it). How many Global Catalogues should you have? What about Operations Masters? Do you know what a RID Master, Schema Master, Domain Naming Master, PDC Emulator or Infrastructure Master is – and do you know how many you should have in your organisation? These are all questions to which you should know the answers before you start designing your Windows 2000 network.� Ironically, Windows 2000 will be the least scary to those of you who are coming to NT afresh, perhaps with experience of directory services in the form of Banyan StreetTalk or Novell NDS. For you guys, Windows 2000 will seem logical, the way NT should have been from the start. For the rest of you, however, those of you with years of experience with NT and its love-‘em-or-hate-‘em domains, Windows 2000 represents a whole new way of life. Now is the time when you have to approach your next upgrade with a whole new mind set – an open mind, capable of forgetting everything you ever learned about domains�- and set about designing your network from scratch. And believe me, training is not an option!
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