I just installed a new Intel based server for a client and ran into something both interesting and disturbing. Enterprise software vendors have always (or at least tried) placed a high premium on backwards compatibility. When for example Digital Equipment Corporation released a new version of their VMS operating system, customers would expect their existing applications and configurations to just work. The new server I set up for the customer needed to be running Windows 2000 server at the insistence of their software application vendor. They already had an existing Windows NT 4.0 server which had been set up as a domain controller, DHCP server and DNS server. When I installed the new server I was expecting to make the new server a secondary domain controller on the LAN. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Microsoft does not allow a Windows NT server to be the primary domain controller when there is also a Windows 2000 server domain controller on the network! Microsoft requires that the existing Windows NT server be upgraded to Windows 2000 server. When I attempted to make the new Windows 2000 server a backup domain controller it complained that the existing server didn't have Active Directory Services and therefore the two servers could not be have a primary/secondary relationship.
I wrote the above a couple of days ago. Today I heard from my client that they were experiencing SQL 2000 Server "communication link errors". The client called the software vendor and was told to replace the servername in their ODBC source setup with the IP address. Guess what, on a 12 node LAN, the client workstations can't get their DNS lookups for the server resolved quickly enough - hence the communications errors! The more I see of Microsoft's stuff, the worse it smells. Is it just me? -Alex _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss