A Microsoft Professional Developers Conference(PDC) has preceded
every new version of Windows NT. And NT 5-don't call it Cairois no
different. From November 3 through 7, Microsoft offered 4000 developers a look
into the future, or at least into Microsoft's view of the future.
Some of that future affects programmers, some affects network
administrators, and at least some of it affects us all. The focus of the
conference wasn't entirely NT 5.0, but also the nuts and bolts of a concept that
for years Microsoft has called Cairo. Cairo isn't a product; rather, it is a
laundry list of things that Microsoft wants to see as part of its flagship
operating system, NT, and NT's complementary set of applications, BackOffice.
Not all of Cairo will be ready even by the time NT 5.0 ships--but NT 5.0 will
incorporate a lot of Cairo.
What are the Cairo technologies? Think of them as support, base OS
services, and client/server and database support.
Support
Microsoft has realized that the big cost of owning a PC is neither the cost of the hardware nor the software, but the support costs--that is, the care and feeding of PCs. Microsoft answers that concern with Zero Admin Windows, which means easier and smarter setup routines and better use of the network as a place to store your desktop configuration. Your "state," everything that describes your configuration, will be stored on the network and on your PC. That way, if you need to log on to another computer on the network,
your state (down to particular OS revisions and applications loaded) follows you
automatically and transparently.
As the PDC briefings included no demonstrations of the new features and
functions, knowing how practical Zero Admin will be is difficult. Logging off
could become an hour-long process if the state turns out to be a large amount of
data. (Actually, in Microsoft PDC-speak, you can't say "a large amount of
data"; you have to say "a rich data set.")
Another part of Microsoft's plan to reduce PC costs combines an old idea,
diskless workstations that boot from a network server, with a new idea: Add a
disk! The result is a Net PC, a computer that uses its hard disk as a place to
cache network information. Designed mainly as an answer to the Network Computer
(NC), the Net PC is easy to build from off-the-shelf parts and will probably be
a good solution for extremely net-centric PC shops. (See Mark Smith's December
editorial, "Back to the Future," for a perspective on these
developments.)
Base OS Services
The basic NT platform will see a lot of changes
with version 5.0. People who want to build large networks with NT are currently
stymied by a security model built on the idea of domains and trust
relationships. Domains are independent security and control areas (think of them
as countries), and trust relationships are a required precedent before any
sharing can happen between domains (think of trust relationships as economic
treaties between countries). Unfortunately, you can build trust relationships
only between pairs of domains, one at a time: If A trusts B and B trusts C, A
does not trust C unless you create an explicit trust between A and C. If
your company has 20 domains, you have to build and maintain 380 (19*20) trust
relationships if you want each domain to trust each other domain.
NT 5.0 will abolish that requirement with a system called Active Directory.
To NT users, this new system means that you can build trees of domains with
transitive trust relationships: In the A, B, and C example, A does trust
C. Active Directory replaces the current centralized Security Accounts Manager
(SAM) with a distributed directory similar to an X.500 directory service or,
more specifically, a directory service that follows the Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol, or LDAP. (If LDAP is a new concept for you, look in
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/networking/directory/x500ldapfaq.html for a
useful, well-organized introduction.) You access the LDAP information with
Directory Service Web Browser (DS Web), an administrator tool that will replace
User Manager. The name is DS Web because NT lets you control system
configuration through a set of dynamically built HTML pages, so you use Internet
Explorer (IE) to manage your NT domains.
But what is a dynamically-built HTML page? In this case, it's part of
another Cairo piece, Active Server, which is the generic name for Internet
Information Server (IIS) versions 3.0 and 4.0 and another tool for building Web
pages, Active Server Pages (ASP). With ASP, Microsoft extends the capabilities
of its Web server with an old friend, Visual Basic. The ASP capability produces
ordinary HTML pages, but with Visual Basic embedded in a simple, easy-to-use
manner that could well revolutionize Web-based programming in the same way that
BASIC simplified programming under DOS and Windows.
Client/Server and Database Support
NT 5.0 will also bring the
Distributed File System (Dfs). It lets you blend several physically separate
directories into one network share, even if the directories are on different
computers.
With Active Directory, Dfs provides fault tolerance by letting you specify
fallback directories: If directory A on machine 1 stops being available, the
system will automatically switch to directory B on machine 2. No, this solution
is not clustering, but it's awfully simple to set up. (For more information
about Dfs, see Sean Deuby and Tim Daniels, "Dfs--A Logical View of Physical
Resources," December 1996.)
If you're building client/server solutions, you'll be interested to know
that Microsoft demonstrated its Transaction Server, previously code-named Viper.
This tool does for PC-based client/server systems what the CICS does for
mainframe-based transaction systems. Designed to simplify the entire process of
building a PC-based transaction system, Transaction Server generated excitement
among attendees at Long Beach, as did Microsoft's announcement that a new NT API
would support 64-bit memory structures in a limited fashion.
—Mark Minasi