This section is designed to introduce you to Windows NT and the necessary tools you will need to operate Windows NT. This assumes that you have some experience with Windows-95 or Windows-98 including installation and configuration.
This is designed as a self-paced tutorial with a series of exercises. The exercises are intended to be performed in order from start to finish. Later exercises depend on the successful completion of the earlier exercises. Once all of the exercises have been performed, you will have a working system with the following software installed and configured:
After completing the exercises, you should actually reinstall the system using the settings that you determine to be the best for you r particiular situation. The tutorial materials can be used as a reference as you install your system.
One of the reasons that many sites choose to run Windows-NT is the large amount of supporting books and training materials available. In general you can go to your local bookstore and browse until you find something that solves your problem. The following books were used as references while working on this material:
You should purchase serveral books to use as reference while you are doing the exercises. You should follow along in your books as you go through each phase of the tutorial so you become familiar with the material in your books.
Another area which you should consider is the pursuit of Microsoft certification and a Mcirosoft Certified Professional or Microsoft Certified Software Engineer. You can find information regarding Microsoft certification at http://www.microsoft.com/certification/. While getting this certification is a good way to increase your value to your organization, it is also a good way to motivate yourself to study how Windows NT operates. If you are going to be a professional system adminstrator, it is a good idea to begin to learn the tools of the trade.
Operating a production is a significant responsibility. Your users will expect that the server is always up. If groups are placing their content on your server, then they would normally expect the system to be up all of the time. If your site contains valuable information, it should be up so that your customers can access this information.
This technical responsibility leads one to begin to behave as a "system administrator". You might end up carrying a beeper and you might come in late at night or on a weekend to solve a technical problem. On the other hand because these systems are generally quite reliable so outages do not happen all that often. Being a system administrator can be a source of pride as your users access the useful information in your system.
In addition to the technical responsibilities, you will also have some ethical responsibilities. Users may have passwords or other personal information on the server. A system administrator must have very strong ethics. One should never use their "power" as administrator in an unethical manner. You also have a responsibility in the areas of mainting the integrity, security and privacy of your system and the data in the system.
This tutorial is designed to teach you just enough to make you dangerous. You will be able to install and configure a server and get it into production. Unfortuantely, when the first crisis happens you may not be ready to handle it. So, even after the system is up and running smoothly, you need to improve your skills.
This tutorial is designed to accomplish several tasks
The tutorial is not even close to being the definititive documentation on any of these topics. For example, many books have been written on how to use FrontPage to edit web pages but there is exactly one paragraph on editing web pages in the entire tutorial. You can think of the tutorial as a quick overview or table of contents to these software components. It is the "Cliff Notes" of NT documentation.