Windows NT® Structure

NT Networking Improvements expected in NT 5.0

VPN (Virtual Private Network) Tools:

Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) - similar to PPTP
IPSec (IP Security)
Distributed Time Server software included
All IP Server Administration (including modifications) will be doable without rebooting
Dfs - Distributed File System
Active Directory Services (Microsoft’s Network Directory Service)

Compare:


NT 3.51 - 6 million lines of code
NT 4.0 - 16 million lines of code
NT 5.0 - 27 million lines of code so far
Linux 2.0 - 1.5 million lines of code

Windows NT® Magazine

"Microsoft's marketing prowess has all but guaranteed that NT will be a major desktop operating system in the twenty-first century, if not the desktop operating system of the future. But NT 4.0's quality problems and the ill-fated Service Pack 2 leave open the question of whether Microsoft's development prowess is up to the NT 5.0 challenge. Although no one can answer that question yet, I saw a disturbing trend at the PDC that might indicate Microsoft is not ready: More than half of the demonstrations I saw on the first day failed."

If NT 5.0 delivers, it'll be a new benchmark in operating system price and performance--but let's hope that Microsoft takes its time. Most customers would rather see a high-quality product that doesn't ship until 2000 than an unreliable one that takes six service packs to become stable.

Service pack 3

Really Security Pack 3. The patch improved the following:

1.Server Message Block (SMB) signing (stops SMB packet hijacking)
2.Password filtering (forces user password to obey set rules)
3.Anonymous user restrictions (allows disabling of anonymus access)
4.System keys (unique signature without which the system will not boot)
5.CryptoAPI 2.0 (allows security functions to be added to apps)


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