Managing a MS Windows NT Network: Notes from the Field
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By Microsoft Corporation
Reprinted with Permission from Microsoft Press
Copyright 1999 by Microsoft Press
ISBN: 0735606471
For more information, go to https://www.microsoft.com/mspress/
Introduction
Welcome to Managing a Microsoft Windows NT Network, fourth in the Notes from the Field series, featuring best practices from Microsoft Consulting Services. Designed for information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) professionals, this book condenses and organizes the broad expertise of field consultants and support engineers, and offers you the benefit of their real-world experiences. Most of the chapters use specific fictitious companies to provide a single frame of reference for understanding the discussion, but all of the material in this book derives from actual customer scenarios or an amalgamation of several technical implementations during which consultants tested and proved their approaches and techniques.
You should use this book as a supplement to the Microsoft Windows NT Server and Workstation 4.0 product documentation and the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit. The resource kit contains a collection of tools essential to optimizing and managing Windows NT networks, and a wealth of information, ranging from high level (Windows NT architecture) to fine detail (installing, configuring, and using point-to-point tunneling protocol - PPTP). The book you are reading now often refers you to it for general and background information.
No single book can cover every necessary management topic for a product as complex as Windows NT Server, and this book doesn't try to. Instead, it focuses tightly on administering and supporting a network. It deals with Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) from several points of view, beginning with the basic (how to use SMS to improve the quality of management while cutting its cost) to the complex (how to use SMS to configure remote control settings). It discusses backup and failover strategies and methods, looks at security inside and outside of the firewall, explains how to lock down environments, and shows how to deal with software distribution within them once they are locked down. It addresses the considerable challenge of automating software distribution in networks of ever-increasing size and organizational complexity. In sum, it assumes that you are already responsible for a large network, then proceeds to examine management areas that you may not have yet explored or mastered.
The third Notes from the Field volume, Optimizing Network Traffic, explains how to build the framework for analyzing, optimizing, and troubleshooting Windows NT-based traffic.
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