Mission Critical! Windows 2000 Server Administration provides crucial Windows 2000 coverage for IT professionals. Mission Critical! books ensure a thorough understanding of the important features and processes of an operating system. Mission Critical! books make sure you understand the components of the system, how and why they work together, and help you focus on the core mission objectives of safety, supportability, reliability, and cost reduction.

To put it in terms understandable to the many former English majors who now manage Windows networks: if Everyman were a system administrator, he'd run Windows 2000 Server. It supports pretty much any business requirement, yet it's user-friendly enough that anyone can learn to be an administrator with a bit of study. Mission Critical! Windows 2000 Server Administration explains how to set up and run Windows 2000 Server on a network. Its approach isn't oversimplified by any means, but neither is it bewildering. With lots of clearly written text and enough stepped procedures to satisfy those who just want to know how to accomplish a specific task, this book balances how-to facts with knowledge-building information.

The administrator's primary goals (maximizing the reliability of the system and minimizing the workload) are top of mind in this book. Technical details (say, configuring permissions for users and groups) are generally combined with a snippet of administrative advice (the merits of using special groups rather than restricting users individually). Each chapter concludes with question-and-answer sections that make great reading (typically, the answers reference related issues as well as responding to the question). The FAQs weren't thrown together to satisfy the publisher's formatting requirements; they are highly readable repositories of Windows 2000 wisdom. This book, though not meant as such, would help someone studying for the Microsoft certification tests on Windows 2000. --David Wall

Topics covered: Windows 2000 Server for system administrators. All widely used aspects of the operating system, including Active Directory, IntelliMirror, users and groups, the TCP/IP stack, and name resolution with Domain Name Service (DNS) and Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS). Security coverage includes the local machine and the local network, as well as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) under various tunneling protocols.