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 servicethat 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 charactersincluding 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.