Windows Server Cookbook

Chapter 1. Introduction

The Windows Server operating system (OS) has come a long way in the past ten years. In the early days of Windows NT, system crashes were common annoyances that administrators had to learn to deal with. There were few tools to manage the OS, and the ones that were available, which mainly consisted of the graphical variety, were limited in functionality and didn’t scale well. Also at that time, Microsoft was not yet serious about providing intuitive scripting interfaces, which would enable administrators to automate repetitive tasks. The result was that administrators were forced to do a lot with a little.

The tides changed dramatically with the release of Windows 2000, which turned out to be much more scalable and manageable. Microsoft began to improve in the management areas it had previously lacked by adding more tools and introducing several new scripting interfaces that were robust and easy to use.

But in many ways, Windows 2000 felt like a first version release of a major piece of software, which it was. Windows 2000 did a lot of things right, but there were still major gaps in terms of manageability. Windows Server 2003, Microsoft’s latest server OS, is a much more mature platform. It isn’t as big of an upgrade as Windows NT to Windows 2000, but Microsoft smoothed out a lot of the rough edges that were present in Windows 2000.

So what are we left with? If I had to sum it up into a single sentence: Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 to a lesser degree, ...