Administration of windows 2000 OS

Introduction

Windows 2000 Server was designed with the administrator and other key customers in mind. Microsoft's network operating systems have become increasingly popular over the past several years. Windows NT has found its way into many government agencies, businesses, and other organizations. With its increasing success. expectations have also increased. Users of the operating system have been demanding more from their network operating systems. Windows 2000 is a powerful and robust network operating system that features many changes. enhancements, and improvements over earlier versions. In designing Windows 2000 Server. Microsoft has addressed several areas that are critical to administrators, including improving the system's overall reliability and scalability, providing a pow-erful Internet and application server, and providing a powerful end-to-end management solution, while reducing total cost of ownership.

DNS

The Windows 2000 implementation of DNS server is designed to interoperate with, and take full advantage of, Active Directory. Conventional DNS servers use single-master replication, but Windows 2000 DNS can take advantage of Windows 2000 Active Directory service, which has a multimaster replication engine. In this way, network managers can centralize and simplify system administration and overall system management by not having to maintain a separate replication topology for DNS. Integration with Active Directory, coupled with new features and enhancements to the core Windows 2000 DNS services, provides greater reliability and improved network administration. This paper is aimed at Information Technology (IT) managers who wish to better understand how these benefits can be realized through the deployment of Windows 2000 DNS services.

Windows 2000 DNS Services: New Features and Enhancements

This section summarizes the benefits of the technology enhancements and new features of Windows 2000 DNS server.

Integrated with Active Directory. By integrating with Active Directory and taking advantage of multimaster replication services, the Windows DNS services remove the need for a secondary DNS server and mitigate reliability issues by eliminating single point of failure for updates. This results in a more available, more reliable network for your business.

Secure dynamic update. Secure dynamic update preserves the ownership of the DNS records registered by clients supporting dynamic updates. When a name is created in a DNS database protected by secure dynamic update, then the entity—such as a computer, an application, or a service—that created the record becomes an exclusive owner for that record. This increases security by preventing any other client, including malicious attackers, from deleting or modifying the records with that name. This feature, for example, will impede an attacker trying to modify the A (Host) record by replacing the server's IP address with the IP address of the attacker's computer and redirecting the traffic to their computer.

Aging and scavenging feature. This feature prevents accumulation of stale records in the DNS database (which may affect the performance and validity of the information stored in DNS records) and efficiently releases unused names. This advantage can decrease the number of technical supports calls.

Unicode character support. While conventional DNS server implementations limit allowed characters to the set described in RFC 1123, this implementation of DNS accommodates a wider range of characters—including the UTF-8 character encoding (RFC 2044), a superset of ASCII and a translation of the UCS-2 (or Unicode) character encoding. This saves administrators the chore of renaming devices using a non-strict set of characters on a machine-by-machine basis.

New administrative tools. The new tools include DNS console snap-in, Windows Management Instrumentation DNS provider (available in Resource Kit), and the DNS server command-line tool (Dnscmd.exe). These tools serve to simplify and automate administration.