About Installation

I have used a very specific network configuration to conduct my Windows 2000 security research. I have decided to document it clearly here in this chapter. This is done for several reasons.

First, this should provide an exact reference about how things have been set up here. This may help in case things don't quite work as described in this book.

Second, this helps to restore systems exactly to the desired setup state starting from clean formatted hard disks. Who knows where this investigation might lead me... I might end up with a corrupted or damaged system. I would like to have a document that would allow to restore everything to the state I had before.

Third, because of coexistence problems between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 domain controllers, I needed to set up an additional Linux firewall machine between my production NT 4.0 network and the experimental Windows 2000 network. I have set up IP masquerading on the firewall so that I could access the Internet from Windows 2000 network through the firewall system.

Overall, the intention of this chapter is to simplify the entire installation process in case I need to do it again from scratch. It takes time and significant effort to install everything properly. It is probably a good idea to plan the installation carefully anyway.