Windows 2000 in the Enterprise

A guide to heterogeneous networking with Windows 2000.

• By Yolanda R. Reid
• August 01, 2001

Looking for a textbook for creating a Windows 2000 network? Want to know how make previous versions of Windows work within a Win2K environment? This book might just be what you need. It features detailed discussions of Win2K networking components, including DNS, DDNS, WINS, QOS and RAS. But if you want to understand how the Active Directory works within in a network environment, you might be disappointed.

This book starts off with a brief introduction to networking. However, if you currently don't understand routing protocols and the OSI model, this book isn't going to help you. The purpose of this book, as I understand it, is to help the reader grasp how components of Win2K and Windows NT use network protocols in communication with Novell, Windows and Unix clients for simple network functions such as file and print sharing and remote access.

Windows 2000 Enterprise Networking has a textbook feel to it—rather dry and not well organized. In the middle of the book, there's a chapter called "Designing and Building Windows NT and 2000 Networks." Logically this chapter should be at the beginning of the book and should definitely come before "Upgrading from Window 9X and NT 4.0" and "Connecting Client Workstations." "Network Testing and Capacity Planning" should come soon after "Designing and Building Windows NT and 2000 Networks." Instead, this is the last chapter of the book-some 400 pages later.

The "Tuning and Troubleshooting" section mainly discusses the tools that you can use for network troubleshooting: ping, perfmon, event viewer and so on. Most, if not all, Windows administrators should already be familiar with these tools. Disappointingly, this section leaves out such topics as how to troubleshoot replication issues, logon problems and DNS problems. There is a nice section in this chapter that goes through the process of problem resolution, which will be useful to anyone who isn't familiar with the logic of troubleshooting.

Overall this book is useful and provides good information, although there are times when the authors aren't clear whether they're talking about Windows NT or Win2K. If you haven't had exposure to DNS, DDNS, WINS, QOS or RAS these chapters are well worth reading. If I could make a suggestion to the authors, it would be to, next time, try to focus on one base operating system and work more logically.