Reader Challenge

[Editor's Note: Solve this month's Windows NT problem and get the chance to win $100 or a copy of one of the author's books about NT. Email your solutions (don't use an attachment) to challenge@win2000mag.com. Include your full name, mailing address, and connection to NT (e.g., administrator, user). Because of the number of entries, we can't reply to all respondents. Look for the solution to this month's problem in the July issue.]

Dave overslept. His company had scheduled him to perform minor maintenance work before 7:00 a.m. on the accounting department's server, which is both a PDC and a file server for the 10-member department. Dave woke up at 8:00 a.m. and rushed to the office, but he was too late. His boss was waiting for him, and three users had already logged on to the server. "You're in trouble," Dave's boss exclaimed, "because I needed you to finish your work this morning. These three users are in the middle of closing the books for the month and can't stop their work."

Problem
"I'll be out of trouble in a minute," said Dave. "I can do my work because I don't need to take the server down, and three users won't strain the server to a point that might prevent me from performing my maintenance work. Those users can continue working, but new users can't log on." What trick does Dave know that will let logged-on users continue their sessions but won't let new users log on to the server?

JANUARY WINNERS

Congratulations to Jason Boche of Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, and Xavier Lescalier of Ghent, Belgium. Jason won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the January Reader Challenge. Xavier won second prize of a copy of Windows NT Troubleshooting (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1998). And congratulations to several readers who caught the extra challenge and correctly stated that the feature you use to scan a disk in NT has no name, although users call it ScanDisk.

Problem
The BigBiz Human Resources department is designing tests for new employees. We peeked at some of the questions for potential IT professionals to find out what qualifications BigBiz is looking for. See whether BigBiz might hire you! Can you answer these questions?

1. True or False: You can use ScanDisk on a 3.5" disk.
2. What are the next three entries in this list: KB, MB, GB, __, __, __.
3. Explain the abbreviations in the answers to question 2.
4. FAT is the acronym for File Allocation Table. What is the name of the equivalent index (i.e., file location tracking device) for NTFS?

Solution

1. True
2. TB, PB, EB
3. A terabyte (TB) is 1000GB, a petabyte (PB) is approximately 1000TB (2⁵⁰ bytes), and an exabyte (EB) is 1 billion gigabytes (2⁶⁰ bytes). An exabyte is also approximately 1 quintillion bytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes).
4. Master File Table (MFT)