For those of us interested in Windows 2000 only as an application server platform used to deploy Domino, the good news is that many of the same basic concepts you've learned in the past will still be useful with this latest version. The not-so-good news is that many of the server tools for Windows 2000 have been moved or relocated, so it will take a little while to feel totally at home with Windows 2000.

In this article, I'll briefly summarize the major changes that will be of interest to those of us working with Windows 2000 as a Domino server platform. Of course, the complete set of changes in Windows 2000 is enormous. Nearly every element of the product feels like it has changed somehow, but for now we'll just focus on getting you up and running.

Windows 2000 installation
The minimum hardware requirements have increased with this version. This is not likely to affect your production servers, but it may be an issue for your test environment. You'll need a minimum of a Pentium 133 processor with 64MB RAM (at least 128MB is recommended) and at least 671MB free space on your boot drive.

If your BIOS supports it, the Windows 2000 CD is bootable. It uses the El Torrito format. Alternatively, you may need to create the four (yes, that's progress for you!) boot disks required to install Windows 2000.

A quick tip: You can create the boot disks now with the \BOOTDISK\MAKEBT32.EXE command from the CD on Windows NT or Windows 2000, or you can use \BOOTDISK\MAKEBOOT.EXE for DOS or Windows 9x.

The default installation enables DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) for auto-configuration of TCP/IP, which in most cases you don't want on a server, so make sure you change this. Also, keep in mind that when DHCP is enabled, the server auto assigns itself an IP address from the 169.254.0.0 network if the server cannot get a response to a DHCP request.

File system and disk changes
There are a number of file system and disk changes.

NTFS 5.0
Windows 2000 introduces an updated version of NTFS, known as NTFS 5.0. This is needed for many of the new file system functions such as disk quotas and encrypted files. This has implications if you're intending to dual boot different versions of Windows NT on the same server. Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 introduced changes that make it able to read NTFS 5.0 partitions, but no versions of Windows NT before Windows NT 4.0 can read NTFS 5.0 volumes.