Installed Win2k
Sep 20, 2003
I wish it were because I just had to play around with the material I mentioned in Inside Microsoft Windows 2000 but it wasn’t. I agreed to do some work for a friend involving Active Server Pages and a Java Applet. I figured it would take, at most, four hours to get the two to play nicely together. I figured wrong. Wrong by about 16 hours and still counting.
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I became so frustrated with the interaction of the two and the inability of the webhosting service to tell me anything useful (are there no logs? I know IIS can log.), that I spent three more hours today assembling a PC from two incomplete ones that had been given to me and installing a 120-day evaluation copy of Windows 2000 that I had lying around. Then installing additional components to get IIS. Then configuring IIS. And that’s just the start because I want get itnpatched up with all the current bugfixes before I do anything and that means multiple trips to the windows update site and that means multiple reboots.
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You could just chalk it up as the time needed to get the tools ready but that isn’t all that needs to be done. Now you need to:
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Download and install WinZip
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Get <a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/>Putty so you have a decent telnet and ssh client.
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Pull down the installer for OpenSSH on Windows with the bundled Cygwin tools and configure it.
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Install a working JVM and browser plugin, so go to Sun’s Java site and pick something more recent than Java 1.1.nn
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Finally, because there is no such thing as remote administration on Windows and the Microsoft intellimouse (hey! they make a great mouse) driver plays dead when used with a KVM switch, install TightVNC
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And, if you might ever need a decent editor, stop and install either XEmacs for Win32 or Vim for Win32.nn
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If I end up doing any more Windows work- and that’s a big IF- I think I see a small project beforehand to put all of this together into a self-installing archive with the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.