The below screen displays all the virtual machines I provisioned AND configured in 1 night. This list includes:

  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server Active Directory
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server Exchange
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server File Server
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server IIS ( To be used with the Geocities archive )
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server SQL Server 2000
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server WSUS
  • Windows 2000 Professional
  • Windows XP Home Edition
  • Windows 98
  • Windows 3.11
  • Linux Web Server (Nginx)
  • Linux Dial up Server

Alt text

The things I accomplished in a single day:

  • Got the Active Directory set up and configured. This did include adding all the other servers listed above to the domain. The part people forget about a 2000-era domain is that AD is inseparable from DNS: dcpromo will offer to install and configure DNS for you, and you should let it, because domain controllers advertise themselves through SRV records under _msdcs and clients find them no other way. Point a member server at your router’s DNS instead of the DC and the join fails with an error that says nothing about DNS.
  • Got the MS Exchange 5.5 installed and configured. All the hosts now have email. Exchange 5.5 is the interesting anachronism in this lineup: it predates Active Directory and carries its own X.500-style directory, entirely separate from the domain. That split is exactly why the Exchange 2000 migration was so painful in the real world, and running 5.5 alongside a 2000 domain reproduces the awkwardness faithfully.
  • A simple file server with a small 50gb drive. This was helpful in getting the WSUS configured
  • IIS is installed, but not completely configured. I am waiting on the Geocities archive and future posts. I have an Nginx and I am going to write a small Python/Django script that will mimic a hotmail server sign in and sign up. This python script will use the active directory and have the same CSS as the 90s version of hotmail.
  • I have no reason to have a SQL Server 2000, but itll be there if/when I need it
  • WSUS was a lot of work. Itll have another pose. The short version is that it wants SP4, IIS, and a database, and it is fussy about all three.
  • I had a previous Windows XP VM. I just joined it to the domain
  • The Windows 98 is pretty hosed up. Worth noting it cannot be a real domain member anyway: 9x has no machine account and no Kerberos, so it authenticates against the domain for file shares and nothing more.
  • The Windows 3.11 is basic.
  • The Linux Web server is an nginx server that will act as a proxy for the Geocities archive and other hosts I scrape from the Internet Archive.
  • The Dial up server is another host. This is an Ubuntu server that is connected to a mgetty/USB 56k modem and an Linksys PAP2T. More details to come. However, this does work and provides a dial up connection to the other servers. The chain there is worth spelling out: mgetty answers the modem and hands the session to pppd, which authenticates and assigns an address, and the PAP2T is an analog telephone adapter providing the FXS ports so several machines can “call” each other over SIP without a telephone line in the building.

The whole thing is period-accurate in the sense that matters: the failure modes are the original ones. Everything hangs off DNS, Exchange has opinions about a directory that is not the domain’s, and nothing has a certificate.