More than a manual
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation Resource Kit and Microsoft Windows NT Server
Resource Kit are full of useful information and belong on every administrator's bookshelf. (For
a review of the resource kits, see Jonathan J. Chau, "Resource Kit Review," March 1997.)
This article does not focus on the volumes of documentation but rather on the tools that come on the
CD-ROM packaged with the resource kits. The tools alone are worth the price of the resource kits.
What Is the Resource Kit?
The NT Workstation resource kit includes a thick book--1350 pages--and a CD-ROM. The text of the
book is also on the CD-ROM. In addition to a selection of the tools I'll discuss below, the NT
Workstation CD-ROM contains the NT client-based administration tools. You can install these tools to
administer an NT network from a computer running NT Workstation. The tools include User Manager for
Domains, Server Manager, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Windows Internet Name Service
(WINS), Remote Access Manager, and Remote Boot Manager. You must install these tools separately;
they are not part of the default resource kit installation process.
The NT Server resource kit includes three volumes: Microsoft Windows NT Server Resource
Guide, Microsoft Windows NT Server Networking Guide, and Microsoft Windows NT Server
Internet Guide. The NT Server resource kit CD-ROM includes the complete text of the three NT
Server volumes and the NT Workstation resource kit's book. The CD-ROM includes about 30 utilities
that are not on the NT Workstation resource kit's CD-ROM. These utilities include the Browser and
Domain monitors, some DHCP tools, and time synchronization utilities, most of which will interest
only systems administrators. The CD-ROMs are valuable for those of us who work outside the office
and don't want to haul around a suitcase full of manuals. Briefly, the resource kits expand on the
information in the NT manuals and Books Online, providing the background you need to troubleshoot
and optimize NT systems.
The resource kits include tools that systems administrators and systems engineers can use daily.
You might wonder why Microsoft did not include the tools with NT. Well, Microsoft can, and does,
market them as an additional product. But other reasons for separating out these tools exist. Not
everyone will need them, so the tools would just take up additional disk space on most systems. Many
of these utilities do not conform to the standard interface or fit neatly into a category. The
Microsoft programmers wrote many of the tools for their own solutions, and the tools became part of
the resource kits as other people adopted and applied them.
Most of these utilities have not been through the regression testing that NT has undergone. In
other words, watch out for bugs in the code! Microsoft does not guarantee the performance of the
tools, response times on support, or bug fixes. But Microsoft supports the tools as time permits and
will attempt to provide fixes as needed.
When you install the tools from the CD-ROM, they are grouped in folders. I'll discuss them in
the order they're grouped. I used the NT Server resource kit's CD-ROM, so some of the tools might
not appear on your system if you install just the NT Workstation resource kit CD-ROM.
Configuration Tools
The first group consists of the configuration tools. With Auto Logon, you can bypass the
usual NT logon screen with a default username and password. This utility restricts you to the
current username, and you can supply the password. Before you systems administrators go into orbit
over this obvious major breach in security, you must know you can do the same thing from the
Registry. From the Registry, you can specify the default domain, username, and password, just as you
can with Auto Logon. And the password is not encrypted in the Registry. I do not recommend
this utility or Registry change in most situations.
C2 Configuration Manager, shown in Screen 1, checks how your system measures up against the C2
security specification. With this utility, you can modify some settings to bring your system into
compliance. For example, you can remove the POSIX and OS/2 subsystems, display a logon message that
warns off unauthorized users, and disallow blank passwords.
Command Scheduler lets you schedule commands on your computer or any other computer on which
you have administrative rights. The commands must be batch or CMD files, which you can set to occur
every day or on specific days. This utility is simply a graphical interface for the AT command.
Time Service for NT sets the time of an NT computer accurately from a variety of sources and
synchronizes computers over a LAN. The icon in the folder takes you to a document file that
describes how this utility works. (For more information about Microsoft's time synchronization
utilities, see Tao Zhou, "Time Synchronization in an NT Network," February 1997.)
Time Zone Editor is handy if you live somewhere that does not conform to NT's preset time
zones. However, most zones are already covered.
When you add another processor to a single processor computer that has NT installed, apply the
Uni to MultiProcessor utility. Do not run the utility if you install it with multiple CPUs in place,
because the system finds the CPUs during installation. Run this utility for upgrading.