Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--8/24/00

I've upgraded two seperate LAN's, fixed a problem that I'd had with the NTFRS. But the BEST thing bar-none about SP1 is the Terminal Services Advanced Client. Download tswebsetup.exe from Microsoft's site. Run the install, open up ISM, select default web site/properties, home directory path, browse, select TSweb. Restart the Website. No more handing out client disks. IE5 becomes your Terminal Service Client. It's incredible.

No big secret about my Windows 2000 upgrade, I had several postings in forum about what to expect and what not to expect.

As it turns out after all of my planning there were only a few walls I ran against.

One) When naming your nt domain, make sure that it is scaleable, names like San Jose or California, won't scale. Names like Company, Country, and Global are better.

Two) DNS on NT. Active Directories needs a Dynamic DNS server to its job, although there are some UNIX Dynamic DNS servers out there most of the an NT one is a better idea.

Three) Along with the above, you need to point all Windows clients and Domain Controllers at the Dynamic DNS server. Especially Domain Controllers you will NOT be able to update a NT 4.0 BDC to Windows 2000 unless you are running Dynamic DNS first and are pointing at it as your sole DNS server.

Four) WINS. WINS is going slowly going away with the Active Directories/Dynamic DNS server stuff you may not even need it. If you are going to keep WINS I suggest a healthy flush of the Dbase after your upgrade to Win2k. I would even redo any static entries as well.

Five) DHCP. Remember to go check on your DHCP server before you call the upgrade a success. There is one added step in Windows 2000 for a DHCP server, you have to initialize and activate the scope.

I installed SP1 on two machines running Windows 2000 Professional. The first machine had W2K installed as an upgrade from Win98. It died. I had to reinstall from scratch. SP1 had installed up to the point where it asked for a re-boot. Once the machine re-booted, it would get about 3/4 way through the second phase of starting up (i.e., on the GUI screen)... just before (or while) it was checking the hardware (i.e., just before the spot where the keyboard l.e.d.'s flash). Thankfully, I had everything backed up and all I lost was a Sunday afternoon reinstalling all my programs.

The second machine, my laptop, was initially a clean install. The service pack installed without incident. Moral of the story? Always do a clean install! The upgrade path may be easier in the short run, but gives more headaches down the road.

Can someone tell me the difference between W2K professional and W2K server? What about enterprise?
sorry if this is not the right forum to ask.

I am currently part of a large Win2000 project and we found that we really could NOT progress without installing SP1, there wasn't anything in particular that was documented and causing us problems but there are so many Dll's that are updated. I know that a few vendors are having problems with various apps not working under SP1 (Checkpoint I think being 1), We have developeres working on a lot of custom apps which rely on the Dll's so we needed to get them working on the newer versions without delay, and just because we havent hit some errors at this earlly stage that dosn't mean that we wont hit the BUGS in the future.
We have had NO BSOD's and no problems with the installs across probably 50 server installs (various custom builds) and no problems on any workstations (also custom builds) that's probably 100-200 machines without problem!

Most of Windows 2000 machines I setup, I didn't notice much difference. However, there were a few windows 98 machines I kept because of incompatibility issues, now, they're all in windows 2000. One cache for this upgrade was that I had to create windows 2000 pro distribution folder with SP1 integrated with orginal files. In this wasy I was able to upgrade legacy machines that I wasn't able to with the orginal CD. You can do this by using update.exe utilty that comes with SP1. If you downloadedSP1, you have unpack it first. It's in update folder and use update.exe -s option.

Since Microsoft has eliminated the "fluff" from the Service PAcks for Windows 2000, I feel it is a worthwile for everyone. We are currently in the process of slowly integrating Windows 2000 into our NT LAN. THere have been absolutely no problemns after the install of SP1, with both laptop and desktop machines. It has also helped with some issues regarding Office97 performance.

I installed SP1 a week ago on Advanced server and I run Telocity (DSL). After the install, I no longer had connection to the net. I tried setting the primary IP and Seconary with my subnetmask. Still no connection. Then I tried reconfiguring my DHCPand DNS to allow for my system to connect. Nothing. Chk my alerts and everything was running normally. I then installed Proxy Server and still a no go. I called Telocity to see if they had any insight to this error. They did not. I then uninstalledSP! and low and behold, my service is back up and running. I have Server and Advanced Server to study for my MCSE and I must admit that the 2000 series product from Microsoft is great but, as for their Service Pac's, forget it. I would not recommendany administrator installing SP1 on their system.

I have heard about 1 major and 1 minor annoyances.

The major annoyance is that Maxtor ATA/66 or ATA/100 hard drives seem to have incompatibilities with Win2K SP1. I saw this posted on Paul Thurrott's Winformat list and also on Sunbelt Software'sWin2K news. I'm told by a friend that this bug can lead to data loss.

The minor annoyance is that the Win2K Recovery Console does not get updated when you apply SP1, this causes problems if you try to use the recovery console after applying SP1.

Other than these 2 items I've upgraded 3 notebooks and 5 workstations running Professional and 3 servers running plain vanilla Server and one server running Advanced Server with no problems what so ever yet.

There are alos known issues with personal firewall software such as blackICe defender which have been publicized quite a bit

I merely have something that SP1 did NOT fix. When using Windows 2000 with the Novell Netware Client 4.70, click on the properties of any Netware queue-based printer causes explorer to restart. Any thoughts anyone?

I say that any improvement from the original is worth doing as far as Windows 2000 is concerned. I'm told that it was originally released with over 63,000 bugs. But it does include a lot of cool new toys and features that makes us netadmins drool. My opinion on any service pack is get it, wait about 2-3 weeks and see if anyone starts complaining about conflicts with applications that are critical to your environment. Then when those application release patches, get them and install both theapplication patch and the service pack. Or better yet install it on a non critical machine and see if you have problems. This is a pretty good overview of SP1 here
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/win2k_sp1.asp

1. After install the Windows 2000 SP1 I found that it had fixed the bugs I was having with the compatibility between Windows 2000 and my McAfee Virus Scan enterprise suite. With standalone Windows 2000, the end users machines could still go out and retrieve the updates from the Server, but the MMC that would control the PC updates and Scans no longer worked. This was fixed with SP1.

2. After upgrading my WinNT 4 server with IIS 4 to Windows 2000, I found that their were a considerable number of problems with our custom asp's causing Windows 2000 to loose all mappings in the WINS database. After installing SP1, the compatability with most, if not all of our custom asp's were fixed and all our end users can see each other once again.

It was a nightmare trying to work with the original release of Windows 2000 without the Service Pack, and I just have to say that I am much more relieved now that I have it.

I recently installed the service pack on an IBM Thinkpad 660 laptop. No problems on the laptop until i tried to shut it down.SP1 updated the ASPI components and now the laptop will no longer auto power down.Have to manually hold down the power button to switch the laptop off. IBM Claims that this might be addressed in a future BIOS release for the laptop. Strange how it was working before the SP1 install.

Well, I installed it over the weekend, and so far so good. No crashes, lockups, or blue screens. I checked out NTfaq.com, which is a part of the excellent Windows 2000 magazine group. If you haven't been there, go there. Excellent bunch of FAQ's, boards, etc..

I have apoplied SP1 to my home machine and have noticed no change in performance at all. I was not having problems before, and do not have problems now. I would not install it on a mission critical server unless I was having problems that are suppose to be addressed by it.

On nw install s this worked ok for us. On On machines upgraded from NT-to-W2K-to-W2K sp1, we got the BSOD. With a KERNAL error, that was not recoverable with emergency repair.
All that was left was to whack it and start form scratch. Then it workedfine. Prior to upgrade the system passed all the hardware compatibility tests. Not ver specific I know but 3 times in a row was enough for me.

This happen on 2 HP-KYAK XM's dual proc 450's with 512memory and on DELL poweredge 1300 dual proc 733's with 512 meg.

I installed SP1 on my IBM ThinkPad A20P originally loaded with Windows 2000 Professional hoping to get rid of problems with changing password on Netware Login and the dial-up connection password saving.
The upgrade to SP1 went smoothly, but the above problems are still there. Perhaps the next bug fixes will take care of my problems... Oh, and I had to get a patch from ZoneLabs for my ZoneAlarm firewall to make it work. No problems installing this patch.

Sp1 eats advanced server

I have a small lan test lab going for my msce stuff, sp1 installed on win2k pro went fine, in fact it seemed to make the 2k boxs fly. But when i installed sp1 on my servers,... it destroyed advanced server's routing demand-dial(nat)interface, in fact i had to stop the service (used recovery console)and reconfig it all again. Sp1 was ok on 2k server. It didn't destroy active directory, which has got to be a bonus - heh.

laters

crusty

I know this is a month late, but I wanted to add my two cents. We are deploying Win2K pro. So as part of the deployment we included SP1. Second part to our equation is that we are developing an in-house client server app., part of which is already deployed. When the users started acquiring and using their Win2K SP1 machines with our in-house app. query time increased on an Access database call (we use it for reporting). Turns out there is a Jet SP4 included with SP1 for Win2K (along with aMDAC SP). This Jet SP4 was increasing the Access database calls from 1-5 to over 100,000 times! A query that use to take 5-10 seconds would take 3 minutes. Obviously we have a call in with Microsoft. Of course, this brings up the question of: "Why didn't we catch this in the test environment?"

I have heard of modems not working, or not being listed in device manager after installing the service pack.

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