Windows 2000 Server Support

One of my clients called me reporting that their server stopped responding and so they rebooted. Upon reboot, the server seemed to hang forever and would not actually boot. I attempted to boot into safe mode, nothing, active directory restore mode, nothing, recover console, nothing.

Next step is to boot the windows 2000 server CD-ROM and run a repair (note be very careful about trying this on a domain controller, PLEASE BACKUP YOUR SYSTEM BEFORE TRYING ANY of THIS STUFF, USE GHOST AND BACKUP THE ENTIRE DRIVE TO AN IMAGE FILE SO THAT YOU HAVE A BASELINE TO GO BACK TO)

Even running the command from the recover console would not allow me to boot and do anything. Never before had I been so completely locked out of a system.

Mixed mode vs native modes for Windows 2000

Mixed mode if you have Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers in your Windows 2000 domain.

Native mode handles groups better, still talks to Windows NT 4.0 member servers and Exchange 2003 required native mode.

Here is how to covert your Domain to native mode
WARNING! Once this is done it can not be reversed.

Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Active Directory Users and Computers
Right-click the domain and choose Properties
General tab,
Click Change Mode.
Click Yes, Click OK!

For more info, check out tech net article:

Recently, it has come to my attention that some of my customers are wanting to have an automated way to set their profiles stored on a server so they can roam around and get their profile where ever they go. I decided to write an article on how to do just that.

Configuring a Roaming User Profile
You can configure a roaming profile by using the following procedure.
To configure a roaming profile for users:
1. Create a folder on the server where user profiles will be stored. This will be the top-level folder that contains all the individual user profiles.
2. Configure the folder as a shared folder, and give all users Full Control permissions.

In this article I will describe the proper way to set up a windows 2000 DNS server for use with active directory.

Before I begin, let me say that active directory is going the way of the dinosaur. Here I am browsing the internet for interesting things and what do I see, an add from Microsoft on how they are better and cheaper then Linux to run for business. I'm sorry but coming from a guy that sells this stuff to companies every day, I have to say that I can build a Linux mail server with quality parts for under 600.00 that would support easily 50 users. If I wanted to use Microsoft’s exchange server, this many users would cost about 9,000 after you consider the licensing costs that Microsoft charges for their software. I personally think this is great for techs because if you learn the Linux way of doing things, you could easily provide the open source solution to your customers, and charge 75 percent of what the Microsoft solution was going to cost and still make a killing on it. Why has this not already happened? Well I think that Linux is about 5 years behind in the learning curve of the population. Microsoft has invested money in taking its software to the techs, by putting up schools for techs to learn Microsoft software, making a MCSE cert program, so you now the techs are locked into their software and thus so are the companies. I think its a great idea and hope to use it to convince everyone that open source software is worth checking out. It takes years to learn it, I will not kid you but so did that windows 2000 server that your trying to work on right now didn't it? Anyway now I have said my thing, here is what you came here for.

In this article I will discuss how to promote your windows 2000 server to a domain controller. You would normally want to do this if your running more then 10 people in your company, want to use an exchange server, or basically make your life easier in general. This document assumes that you have already installed windows 2000 server installed all updates, and are sitting at a blank screen ready to go. Make sure you have the windows 2000 server CD-ROM ready as you will need it for part of the install.

Steps in the order I’m doing them...

0) SET UP A STATIC IP ADDRESS ON THE COMPUTER AND MAKE SURE YOU CAN BROWSE THE INTERNET FIRST.