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Hi again everyone,

This is the 2nd weekly installment in my rambles, covering Logging in on WindowsNT machines.

Last week I was trying to explain logging in generally, and on the average Windows 3.1 PC such as about 75% of the staff here have; and several things had a disclaimer "doesn't apply to Windows NT". Since most new machines will have Windows NT on them, and we have the ability to set them up to be shared by staff, let me explain how they work. Most of the library's PCs run on MS-DOS, which Bill Gates bought from a small Seattle company which had called it QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). It was designed for the original IBM PC which had a plain green-on-black text screen, floppy drives, no ability to connect to anything except with a 300 baud modem, perhaps 64k or 256k of ram, no hard drive, etc. No one at that time predicted that the PC would become as popular as it became, and as more and more people got PCs and used them more and more, hardware changed, new chips came out, hard drives arrived, color monitors, etc. etc. at an increasing pace until we get to the present where any given hardware item is generally obsolete in 6 months.

As Microsoft quickly found out, people who bought this new hardware expected to be able to use it without giving up the use of their older hardware as well, and this meant MS-Dos (it was renamed of course) had to be continually modified to handle this extra functionality. There was a continual tension between adding new stuff and keeping the old stuff working (this is normal for any operating system, it was perhaps worse here because dos was not originally designed with any long-term future in mind). The high point of this modifying is Microsoft Windows, which is Dos program that gives the appearance of a relatively friendly graphical environment that can even run several programs at once, more or less.

But eventually (as someone who has fixed or remodeled houses might know) one needs to tear out all the old stuff and start over from scratch. Windows NT is the result of that effort, starting sometime around 1988 and released in 1993. It is carefully designed to look just like Windows 3.1 while being totally different underneath, so that people could switch to it without having to relearn things. Microsoft made efforts to plan ahead, hired an experienced team of programmers, and basically tried to do it right.

When it came out there was just one little problem: hardly anyone bought it. Even Microsoft had underestimated how much people wanted to stick with what they knew, and also NT required a lot of expensive memory and processor power (it still does) and was not very compatible with old programs (it still isn't). On the positive side, it is very stable and networks very well, resists viruses better (so far), and overcomes several limitations of the old MS-Dos/Windows 3.1 world relating to memory and running several programs at once. And newer versions of NT got trimmed down, while the average PC expanded, to the point that as of today, new "ordinary" PCs can run it fairly well. Microsoft also developed Windows95 as a sort of "intermediate" system until NT becomes more established.

By now you're wondering what this has to do with logging in. The point of all of this is that the very familiarity of how Windows NT looks can be a problem, because the differences will catch you unawares.

For example the logon message says "Press Control-Alt-Delete to login", a sequence that will reboot a Windows 3.1 or Dos machine. In NT it's the basic way to get the system's attention. So you have to be aware which kind of machine you're dealing with. NT contains several kinds of networking built in, of which we are using 3: first our NT network, then our Novell network, then connecting to Unix machines (Bird, Sabio) as needed. The main difference with NT is that you have to log in to use the machine at all; as I explained last week, on a Windows 3.1 machine you log in to our Novell network before starting windows, but if you fail to, the programs on that local machine will still run; with NT if you fail to log in, you can't do anything. There are 2 ways to log in: you can log in to the local machine (the "from:" line in the login dialog box will be the local machine's name), or you can login to the Domain (which is Microsoft's name for the local Windows NT network; ours is named LIB-NT). To simplify this, we've set up all NT machines to only be logged into the Domain, unless a LIST person is working on them. So everyone can always assume that the login dialog should show the username, "from: LIB-NT" and the password, which of course isn't shown. And to further simplify it, we've setup all public machines with an account name that is the same as their machine name, and no password for that account. So if you're walking by a machine in SEL ref. that says "press control-alt-del to login" you can do so, put in the machine name that's on the handy little label on the front of the case, make sure the second line says "from: LIB-NT", don't enter any password, and press the Enter key. If it's working right it should log in.

What to do if the username showing on the first line isn't what it should be? No problem, just click with the mouse and edit it. There's a button on the right side of the "from" field that lets you choose between the local machine and the LIB-NT domain as well. These fields show whatever was entered for the last login, which if we've been working on them might not be what it needs to be for regular use; so feel free to erase what shows up and put the correct info in.

For staff machines, we've kept the user names the same as Novell's on all accounts, so if you are rgrunloh on our Library server, you should be rgrunloh in the NT domain as well (and on Bird too). This comes in handy because all you have to know for a staff machine is put in your username, make sure the "from" field shows LIB-NT again, and in this case there should be a password.

Then, we've set up NT to automatically connect staff to our Novell server after they successfully log in to the NT Domain, provided the username and password on both server match. This connection then enables you to see the shared files, run MS Office, etc. just like in Windows 3.1. Look for the "T" drive under F:\teams and the "S" drive under F:\users\{whoever you are}.

There are a lot of possibilities for what we can setup with NT, but for now LIST is really trying to keep it simple while we get used to it. In the long run this complexity should pay off in more choices for staff. This is more than you probably want to know about NT for now, so I'll only mention one last thing-- just as you should exit windows on an older machine before turning off the power, you should always use the "shutdown" command in NT before turning off the power. Not doing so will eventually mess up the data on the hard drive and cause problems. For the public NT machines, it's better to just leave them running overnight, LIST is planning to implement some remote maintenance programming for them that will run at night.