Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

github.com

395 pointshectorm189 comments

This brings back great memories. Windows 2000 sparked my interest in computing.

I was in elementary school and was obsessed with the 'Log on to' dropdown box on Windows login screens, and how you could use the same credentials on any PC.

Somehow I managed to salvage an old computer and source myself a copy of the ISO and managed to setup an ADDS domain controller and join my mother's laptop to the domain.

I went and asked the IT guy for advice on doing a multi forest configuration and I think it blew his mind. Why did I want multi forest? Guess I was preoccupied with whether or not I could, and didn't stop to think if I should. : )

Some of the most interesting pursuits in my “youthful” computing experience was looking into how to make things work that were meant for large-scape deployment work for personal use. I had a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop (circa 2003, RIP 1 year after due to bad soldering on the mainboard) which came with a Smart Card reader. At one point in time, the holy grail would have been making it work for password-less login on Windows XP.

> This brings back great memories. Windows 2000 sparked my interest in computing.

Same, I remember being so resistant to porting to XP. AND funny enough, when I finally made the shift, it was the first time I ever wiped a hard drive, losing all my precious pirated MP3s.

> Why did I want multi forest? Guess I was preoccupied with whether or not I could, and didn't stop to think if I should. : )

Good news; you belong on Hacker News:)

Are we sure that's "good" news?

Absolutely.

One of us, one of us, gabba gabba hey!

Same here, I experimented with win 2k server as a domain controller and also installed Red Hat with Samba for doing mostly the same. Not because it was useful at home, but because 13 year old me wanted to underhand how it worked and had lots of time.

The windows domain thing was a bit magical, but in the end an old PC with Red Hat and later Debian became a useful home server and router. I think I was quite lucky that my father had a background in IT so we did some things together in early Linux exploration. He hadn't used it before either but did use Unix in the early days.

> Somehow I managed to salvage an old computer and source myself a copy of the ISO and managed to setup an ADDS domain controller and join my mother's laptop to the domain.

Ha. That brings me back as well. I installed (pirated) Windows 2000 Advanced Server onto a Compaq that I won. I ran my own active directory which let me share printers to my mom's laptop (an iBook at the time), and our other PC. It was total overkill, but I deeply enjoyed tinkering with each and every setting to see what it did, discovering the registry and seeing what all of -that- did, breaking things, fixing things... and now here we are. :-)

I miss that feeling. :-)

Eerily similar to me! Minus winning the computer, would have begged someone instead!

My mother wasn't very happy with my experiments with group policy, which included adding the secure attention sequence (control alt delete) to her login screen. And various lockdowns of the start menu and Windows Explorer :)

Overkill is an apt description.

Ha - nice. I won a web design contest from Road Runner in one of their youth categories. That machine was our office PC for a good seven or eight years. Now that I think about it, I'm amazed the hard drive didn't fail. I think I set up a backup system, but I genuinely can't recall how I had it rigged up at the time.

Yup. This exact thing pretty much lead me to a network admin job during college. I had friends that got hired as admins in high school, by the high school, and I was super jealous. The pay sucked but it was a humble start to my career in tech.

God now I am getting nostalgic for the huge network drive shared by the entire school. That shit was wild

I am happy to hear that I was not the only nerd interested in enterprise software during middle school years. You know, while my friends were waiting the latest games, I would wait for the next Service Pack of Windows 2000. Constant exploration of AD, firewalls, networking, purely for curiosity and fun.

Now those friends ask me how to get an IT job by the way :)

I am a little older than you and was writing c++ for windows 2000. One of the funnest things i did was write something called an MS-GINA driver. It let you completely replace that login screen with your own login screen. Think of the possibilities: write your own login screen that looks just like the original, but sends credentials to my remote server.

But if you had any bugs in your driver, BSOD all the way and there was no recovery. Complete reinstall.

edit: reference https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauth

That link 404s for me.

Try this one:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/gina

You can also google “MS GINA windows”

Maybe this one? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/gina

Well if you had access to kd/windbg, you could "overwrite" drivers at load time.

I just ran this on a Fedora machine and connected to Windows using rdesktop. It works and it's amazing. I like it. The Internet will surely be confused today with a surge of traffic from Internet Explorer 5. Incidentally, google.com still loads and allows searching; bing.com does not load.

Nice trip down the memory lane :D. Works great on POP_OS (didn't uninstall my desktop).

Yes, do as I say!

What're the most recent tls features IE5 supports? Does it even work with non-sha1 certs?

Google looks at your user agent and doesn't redirect to https if it's an old browser.

Isn't this a security vulnerability?

For who? For Google? Or for the client? The server's security shouldn't be dependent on https

Both. If you can stop a https redirect by rewriting the user agent header, it can be used to track the Google searches for example. HSTS would help if the browser did connect to the https website recently, but it looks like a security vulnerability to me.

I just realized after writing this comment that if you can rewrite http headers, you can also stop the redirect so perhaps it doesn't matter.

In modern browsers, google.com is in the HSTS preload list, so the browser won't even make an initial request over HTTP.

Only www.google.com and other subdomains are preloaded unfortunately.. I’m having trouble quickly googling the reason (is that irony?) but from memory a Googler said that they had a lot of internal stuff hosted above google.com they couldn’t make https (HVAC controllers and such?)

You can see the full HSTS list here I believe: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:n...

For IE5, there's two distinct obstacles to serving https.

1) It's unlikely to accept any x.509 certificates you can get issued under today's CA/B guidelines; and I'm also not sure how many CAs from then are still valid, either because they had too small of keys or they expired

2) I'm not sure if ie5 supports TLS 1.0 and if it does, it's probably not by default, because that how things were back then.

Given these conditions an https handshake is highly likely to fail, and as the server operator there's no way to provide useful information to the user in that case. If they go to your http site and you redirect them to a handshake error that you know they were going to see... That's not useful. You could be secure and not provide service... but then again, your redirect could be MITMed cause http. Or you could provide a useful service with no security.

This is a choice, not a vulnerability.

This doesn't open up any new way to attack a modern client. Modern clients would have google.com HSTS preloaded and not use http at all. But even if that's not available, a MITM that fiddles with the User-Agent to avoid getting a redirect could have fetched the search results via https and proxied them back via http, as long as the client made an http request.

Edit to add: if you could get a cert IE5 would accept, it likely wouldn't be acceptable by modern clients, so you'd need to distinguish clients from the TLS handshake (although, I guess it really is an SSL handshake for ie5?). There's no client identifier in there, but you can certainly tell the difference between modern and ancient; it gets trickier to tell the difference between ancient and pretty old or pretty old and trying to do a fallback handshake.

When working at Transmeta as a QA engineer, I remember finding a software bug in the Crusoe processor that prevented IE 5.5 from working with SSL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe

It wouldn't be surprising if they did that so people could download a newer browser (such as Chrome...) which would itself be signed anyway.

Perhaps, but all the vulnerability is in using IE5; there's nothing the site can do to make an IE5-compatible connection secure.

google is, ironically, one of the few remaining "major" sites which support http.

i'm a bit of a browser historian, so i regularly browse the web in everything from mosaic, to ie3 and netscape, firefox 3.x, and all the modern-day favorites such as links and w3m.

so i started building my own websites with all the oldies in mind. it takes some tweaking, but not that much, and i enjoy strolling^Wsurfing down memory lane, looking at that gorgeous ie3 menubar, which was replaced with a flat gray in ie4, or writing something in opera 12.x.

With the Web Rendering Proxy (https://github.com/tenox7/wrp) you can also visit bing.com :)

Windows 2000 was my favorite version of the OS. I kept it running far longer than I should reasonably have. Thanks for giving me another reason to fire it up!

I completely agree. People fondly remember XP, but Windows 2000 was peak Windows. It almost looks like a real operating system :)

I agree. People often forget that early releases of XP was basically just a re-skinned 2000 but with a few tweaks for games and fonts. The problem was those skins ended up doubling the memory and CPU requirements. In fact XP was a pretty bloated OS on hardware from 2002. It wasn’t until much later into the life of XP when hardware caught up and newer service packs added enough to the OS to really differentiate it from 2000. But for the first few years of the life of XP, it was an embarrassment.

People also often forget that Windows XP was the first Windows to have WGA, which was fairly controversial. Windows 2000 was the last Windows version you could truly own, instead of having to beg Microsoft for permission every time you reinstalled or replaced hardware.

Windows XP volume licensing still gave customers full ownership without online activation.

I remember a friend used magic jelly bean to pull keys off every pc he came across to stockpile new volume keys he could use after the initial key that went public got banned for windows updates.

I used to run around the big tech shops with my phone and took photos of the Windows Licence sticker (WinXP and later Win7) to have enough keys for my experiments.

I preferred XP with the classic theme, some of its utils were improved.

Which utils?

I think XP introduced the “switch user” option. But I couldn’t find much in XP to justify the additional drain on memory and CPU. However I might not have needed the same utils you came to prefer (Every user is different).

XP was the first that shipped the RDP server in the base... before that you pretty much needed to go up to one of the server SKUs of the OS, or buy third party remote access software. It also added a bunch of newer parts of 802.11 that were necessary for many wifi networks -- particularly corporate ones.

A lot of the WiFi improvements came in later service packs rather than the first edition.

I thought a Windows 2000 supported RDP? I’ve definitely RDPed onto 2000 servers. Was an RDP server not included in the ‘Professional Edition’? Or maybe I used VNC on those 2000 systems and forgotten it wasn’t RDP?

Yeah, I don't think RDP was supported at all on the workstation sku (though it _could_ be made to work w/o support or a legal license) and I think may have been an additional license cost on the base server, then only included on advanced server.

I’d forgotten how annoying it was/is picking between all the different Microsoft releases of the same OS.

Honestly, can't remember. Guessing I think it was the task manager and command prompt niceties. A few extra settings in the control panel.

The firewall appeared in SP2 right? Couldn't do without that today. And easy to set the GUI to classic mode.

Fortunately we had a corporate VLK copy so never had to worry about activation.

SP2 wasn’t released until 3 years into the life of XP. Windows 2000 would have been roughly 5 years old by that point and hardware would have caught up with XPs requirements somewhat so upgrading to XP was a more reasonable choice.

I was talking more about when XP was new.

The Command Prompt tweaks were a 2000 improvement IIRC but I do recall Task Manager and Control Panel receiving updates in the first edition of XP.

Not taking anything away from your core point though. There definitely were tweaks in the early releases of XP that many would have liked. It just wasn’t worth the extra CPU and memory footprint for me and by the time SP2 had arrived I’d switched to Linux full time so never bothered to upgrade from 2000.

I’d go even further: XP was 2000 with some UI elements and ideas that came from Windows Me. That grouping in the control panel only made it harder to find what you needed.

Indeed. The good XP is the SP3.

Why do you think Windows isn’t a real OS? It successfully powers I’d guess hundreds of millions of devices.

To be fair, Linux powers quite literally billions of devices

And a hundred million isn't enough to be real?

It is a joke to say that it is not a real OS.

But if you want to argue: You could say that a 'real OS' must be 'mostly POSIX-compliant' [1]. That way most other OS (Linux, MacOS, iOS) but not Windows would be included in your definition of a 'real OS' ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Mostly_POSIX-compliant

I wouldn’t get why POSIX is the only way to design an OS.

It’s not. It’s an API. IBM’s zOS has a POSIX-compliant Unix subsystem and it has absolutely nothing to do with Unix under its hood.

It is not.

But that way you could pretend to have an objective definition of the term 'real OS' and exclude Windows while including most other major OS.

Windows is mostly posix compliant as it had a POSIX subsystem until 2000, then it had Windows Services for UNIX/Interix and now days has Windows Subsystem for Linux.

regardless of anything else, windows is older than posix... so posix should arguably be windows compliant :P

And those Windows boxes wouldn’t be able to do much without the ones Linux powers, but that’s beside the point: Windows is an OS. It’s quirky and feels weird for the Unix crowd, but a lot of it will be oddly familiar to the VMS elders.

I agree too! It's the BEST!

Same... XP was almost as good because it was basically the same thing, except for its ugly skin.

But even if Windows 2000 would make a come back, I would not switch back to Microsoft because they would probably incorporate their newest tracking methods.

You could set XP to look just like 2000.

Not quite. They broke smooth window resizing in XP.

I actually cut my sysadmin teeth on Windows 2000, and found myself wondering how on earth they could `docker exec` a shell. These were, comparatively, the dark ages of Windows administration, and almost all tasks were done through a GUI.

The implementation is nothing short of genius: they use a Windows version of `netcat` (the common UNIX tool, but compiled for Windows from the Windows 2000 Resource Kit), then use `srvany` (also from the Windows 2000 Resource Kit) to start `netcat` as a system service, but with `cmd.exe` piped to its standard in and out.

Kudos on this solution!

It's genius because it's simple and actually is not a workaround but use of the tools as intended.

Someone posted that 2k was the last nt edition without bloat... I think that was wrong (plus comment seems to have been deleted). 2k3, 2k8, 2k8r2, 2k12, 2k12r2, 2016 and 2019 all have no bloat or random crap... 2022 is mostly the same.... And comes with (chrome) edge too... Since the xp days I have always skipped the home/pro/workstation editions of windows and used server... Gave more features I needed, like hyper v, and felt more stable... Plus less crap...

How is the compatibility with everyday applications?

I haven't found any app that doesn't run on windows server that does on win desktop. I don't game, so never tired games... Wsl on 2019 was limited to v1, but think that got to v2 on 2022... Docker works, all dev tools work... Yea, all good!

The issue is hardware. Most gaming hardware does not have server qualified drivers which may mean you can't use your hardware. Issues normally with WiFi cards and GPUs, most other things will work. No chance of running Windows Server on a laptop.

The qualification is to prevent random crashes; it's not really needed, but it is hard to impossible to disable last I checked.

Never had an issue with drivers... Was running nvidia cards and the standard nvidia drivers worked without issue... Also did manage to run win2003 on a laptop at one stage... Can't remember if drivers for wifi worked... The machine was hard wired in...

I've had wifi, bluetooth, and AMD GPUs fail to work, as well as integrated Intel GPUs. This may just be a 2019+ problem. 2008 might run, I haven't checked.

You may also find power management drivers don't install.

I've also used Server 2019 on a desktop and it's pretty solid. A couple of pointers:

- If you're considered a "student" by any means, you probably have access to an institutional email address that gives you access to Azure for Students. Through the Azure site, you can download an ISO for any LTSC edition of Windows Server (including Datacenter) and get a valid license key. This is a great way of saving money and avoiding sketchy key resellers.

- Driver support is basic out of the box. The PC I used for Windows Server has an AMD graphics card, which normally comes with GPU drivers as soon as you install a consumer version of Windows. This doesn't happen automatically with Windows Server. When you download the GPU drivers from AMD, the installer will detect that you're running Server and error out, but you can tell Device Manager to install drivers from your C:\AMD folder and it will work fine (minus the fancy GUI control panel, which is arguably bloatware itself). Something similar should work for Nvidia cards.

- Normal Win32 applications work great (I used Chrome, Office, IntelliJ, and a number of other everyday apps and they worked perfectly). However, you don't have access to the Windows Store, so installing UWP applications that aren't part of the base system (i.e., anything other than Settings, pretty much) is a pain.

There's a fairly active community of folks gaming on the major public cloud providers, which only provide images for Windows Server, but games work just fine. In fact, NVIDIA provides an official gaming AMI based on Windows Server: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-xrrke4dwueqv6

Way back in the day I played Max Payne on a Win2k server and it worked great. Couldn't make the OS crash even if I tried. Best MS OS ever.

Better than Windows ME?!

Win Me was créme de la créme. I wonder of they could run it emulated longer that on bare metal.

Driver support isn't a given. There's lots of normal hardware which may never be server qualified. You can make a desktop that will run server fine, but it's kind of a Linux situation; you can't pick random parts and assume they'll work.

I have yet to run into this problem, do you have any examples? I don’t have any exotic hardware outside of the ThinkPad X220 dock which nowadays only works with Linux.

Thinkpads are a good bet for Linux compatibility because they are very popular with Red Hat and Ubuntu kernel developers. They’ll do whatever it takes to make Linux run well on their machines.

In a sense yes, but like my current Latitude 7xxx and those original Thinkpad Xxx it’s just paying for a premium product and getting premium hardware and premium chips inside so I get hardware that staffs a development team that makes good drivers and that has manufacturers that staffs a development team good enough to put it on fwupd.

no tux no bux

Not a problem with drivers per se, but Bluetooth is totally unavailable on Server SKUs, outside installing a proprietary Bluetooth stack outside the windows one.

Another issue I've run into was Server 2016 not having trackpad drivers for a Dell laptop's I2C bus/trackpad.

Yes, most startling was Intel iGPU drivers not installing, as well as AMD GPU drivers not installing for non-enterprise cards. Then people have mentioned wireless and bluetooth typically being nonfunctional. Your touchpad may not work if it is I2C or if the PS2 bridge is USB. You may also be unable to get computer peripherals to work if they are not designed to be driverless.

I suspect power management is also poor.

> most startling was Intel iGPU drivers not installing

On which version? I'm running Server 2016 (Datacenter) with an Intel iGPU, and I don't recall having to do anything special to get it working.

The Intel CPU in a Surface. From memory the mobile iGPU had a different model than what shows up in a desktop. I also read AMD iGPUs were failing.

Heard several people claim that, along with stories about how Office 365 wouldn't work, or Photoshop, or recent browsers etc. Each time I would check I was able to call their bluff.

I was always a fan of NT4, personally speaking.

Me too. While I think 2k was peak when it comes to a usable, lean desktop os, to me, NT4 was the first Windows NT that was "complete" and usable, the "we're done" milestone. Can't find the proper expression for it really, but it just has a special place in my IT heart.

NT4 blue screened on me when I was demoing IIS process separation. It was an auditorium full of very technical people, who mostly already knew me from one place or another. Fortunately, I was quite good as a stand up comedian.

I felt vindicated when 98 did the same with billg at COMDEX (or was it CES?).

NT4 had an architectural flaw that was introduced to make some people happier - many device drivers started to run in kernel space and their bugs were able to crash the whole machine, unlike 3.5, where a crashed driver could be reloaded.

You're not alone.

But you can't run any game because DirectX. I've copied some files from Windows98 and was manage to use some games in windowed mode.

Everything after 2008R2 is significantly more bloated. I still interact with a few 2008R2 VMs at work and every time I log on to one I'm actually a little freaked out by how much more responsive it is.

I really liked how stable W2k was as a workstation. I could run a bunch of terminals, programs and hardly ever had a crash. Nothing is worse working an outage or deployment and POOF there goes your desktop.

This was also around the time you could even run bbwin and themes, and tweak it some for fun. Pretty sure cygwin was also around.

Cygwin was very much around. I went to college in 2001 and was forced to use w2k and lived in Cygwin as a result.

Cygwin was a wonderful thing. It wasn’t fast, but integrated the Linux side with the Windows side much better than WSL2 does (at the expense of binary compatibility). It allowed me to develop server apps for Linux on a corporate sanctioned Windows box and deploy them to the real servers (mostly Linux with some Solaris).

Windows Server with the Desktop Experience enabled (plus a few other tweaks: https://www.windowsworkstation.com/win2016-2019/) is much better than Windows 10/11 IMO. Way less bullshit that way

> Why?

>> "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should." - Dr. Ian Malcolm

I like this "Why?" "Why not?" attitude. Surprised though that a whole operating system, kernel and all, is dockerised though, especially that the impression of Docker to me is that it is normally everything but the kernel.

Edit: I didn't read the QEMU in the name. I won't be surprised if this is a full software emulation though (instead of the now-common hardware-assisted virtualisation).

I thought that quote was so funny, I actually laughed out loud. I've definitely dug into technical challenges way deeper than necessary merely because it felt like a challenge and I wanted the feeling of beating/solving it.

You could spend 15 minutes and modify the dockerfile to accept an autoboot executable and it would actually be useful!

Seems like this runs qemu inside the container.

Yeah, pretty run-of-the-mill as far as similar projects go. Maybe a tad over-complicated to put it mildly.

I've done something like this except not with KVM, but with headless Xorg+PulseAudio+Wine to have Hearthstone with sound over RDP.

Did it run? Yes. Did it run like crap? Absolutely!

KVM is being passed to the Docker container, so it is using hardware-assisted virtualisation. Of course, certain things like the BIOS and peripherals will be fully handled in software by QEMU.

Ahh how I truly miss being super focused:

  win2k pro
  winamp 2.92 (and all its glorious plugins. still use it today!!!)
  jasc paint shop pro 7
  jcreator ide
  ati TV wonder
  firewire ethernet
  that network activity icon
  amd k-6 processor
  384MB ram
  a consistent UI
  powertoys
  gpedit tweaks
  ms-word (and yes I rather enjoyed clipit)

Vs today where every piece of modern software fights with you to get work down. There are some exceptions but the list is rather small now.

Questions about this implementation's legality? Liability? Security?

https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-win2000/blob/master/D...

Makes me think this is done as a POC, but definitely fork a local copy as you can just swap that line out with your local copy of a Win2k ISO

Effectively this is done as a POC, don't expect any security on a machine running Windows 2000 nowadays.

Regarding legality, I hope that Microsoft doesn't claim any rights, since the Windows 2000 image has been published in WinWorld for years without issues.

Well they seem to add vnc and netcat shell listeners to the startup scripts so it is kind of backdoored on purpose already outside of what's in the iso

During the installation I add Netcat to have a bind shell, this way you can get a CMD shell from Linux using the "vmshell" command included in the image.

So yes, technically it's backdoored but only for yourself :)

That's not what backdoor means.

2000 and XP/2003 were the last Windows versions I used and cared about. It was with 2000 that I realised working with 2 200MHz CPUs was a better experience than a single 400MHz one (at least on Windows).

cool! I've never considered running qemu in a container. This project is a matroska on actual windows systems, as docker runs/used to run in VM (has WSL changed that?). So VM->Docker->VM. You could probably also run windows-something that supports Docker and run the same image. Oh this gives me baaaaad ideas. Thank you, OP

WSL2 itself also runs in a VM

illumos has had qemu inside a container (or zone) since I believe 2011 when Joyent ported KVM to SmartOS. Nice to see docker catching up already...

Did you mean linux? because docker is just an interface foe cgroups, namespaces and chroot.

the docker system including all the bells and whistles. But indeed I could've just said linux is playing catch-up in this area too...

To be absolutely fair, the first adequate namespaces implementation came out in kernel version 3.8, so that puts us in 2013, when talking capabilities to run %process% in a "container". Admittedly, a few years later than illumos. But then again, illumos was just playing catch-up with *BSD back then, as jails were available since 2000 ;)

By the way, what is your primary motivation for using illumos? genuinely curious.

Well if we go to that, illumos, or rather Solaris had zones even earlier in 2004 or so.

I run illumos and *BSD (FreeBSD servers, OpenBSD on SPARC and network appliances) in production mostly because they just work(tm). They are battle tested pieces of wonderful software engineering with great documentation and community support (ymmv) out of the box. SmartOS has replaced most of our linux and vmware based hypervisors at $work and they are just so much nicer to administer in the simplicity and design compared to the others. In addition we have a Triton cluster as our primary on-prem cloud service.

tl;dr They have proven to be a lot nicer to run as well as more dependable than the alternatives.

Thank you for giving me stuff to read upon. Cheers!

Docker can run Win 2000, but older versions of Win 10 can't run Docker. There must be some irony here.

(comment is a little off-topic, feel free to downvote)

I'm curious how ReactOS stacks up to Windows 2000.

I have a similar image with ReactOS if you want to compare :)

https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-reactos

Oh nice!!!!

Thanks!

In general: https://hub.docker.com/r/tianon/qemu

Best MS OS, they should have just maintained this for the last 20 years.

This is qemu on docker. just so happens to be that a windows 2000 is running on the qemu..

Windows 2000 running in VM in Docker. Might as well skip the docker stage as it does not really add anything.

Otherwise sweet memories. I used Win 2K as a workstation at the time. Loved it.

>Windows 2000 running in VM in Docker. Might as well skip the docker stage as it does not really add anything.

Arguably, it adds the ability to have a network of them, set to different virtual networks in an easier manner than regular qemu bridging.

At least that was my first thought. Then again a)I'm really bad at qemu so anything that makes things easier is welcome b)I'm even worse at working with Docker.

(Hence "arguably" ;-))

This is amazing! Does anyone know if KVM hardware virt works on EC2 / ECS / Lambda / other cloud or VPS vendors?

Also, does anyone know which versions of Windows have restrictions on where you can run it? IIRC, recent versions stipulate you can't just run your own copy of it virtualized without an approved hardware vendor? Or maybe I'm crazy. I know with MacOS the EULA states you can't run it on anything but Apple hardware (thanks, Apple).

If only their EULAs weren't so restrictive, it would be easy to spin up a build+test cluster for your apps for all platforms. Sucks that developing cross-platform is now legally/financially more troublesome than it is technically.

This reminds me of a job I had about 13 years ago. I worked for a startup called SafeDesk. The idea was that we created custom debian-based live images that we network (PXE) booted to diskless PCs. So naturally the system would be instantly "wiped" when rebooted. We sold this to a few libraries and schools and even prisons.

Somehow we got into running vmware player with Windows 7 (?) on those diskless systems because of course some customers wanted windows. We PXE booted linux and then ran windows on it through vmware. It was insane and pretty stupid and terribly slow, but I learned a shitload about linux from that job.

I wish there was an easy way to mux display usage to containers sor hat things like these wouldn't need to run an RDP server for you to access the and we could have `--display window=640x480` or `--monitor /dev/....`.

I've been using Apache Guacamole to have central access to KVM/bhyve-inside-a-container (or rather inside a zone) servers running on SmartOS.

However, I'm not using RDP at the moment as there is also VNC-access available as default that Guacamole connects to.

A year or so before Windows XP brought the NT kernel to home users, I chose to switch from Windows Me to 2000 to reap the benefits in computer stability. I was using a business operating system before it was cool.

I got my first laptop in the year 2000, it was a hand me down and weighed like three bricks but I loved it so much. In the next year I found out the high school decommissioned computer parts and started picking them up and building working machines at home.

The hardest thing in setting up a local area network at home for me was finding a router (we were poor and I couldn't just buy it). But I did get hold of a crossover cable and was able to set up a LAN running win 2k between two machines.

That made me at least as happy as watching Angelina Jolie play Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.

A handful of PCs running pirated Win2k licenses and Small Business Server 2003, hooked up via an eBay Cisco switch was the start of my career in Ops. I learned so much back then!

I love the speed and simplicity of Win2k.

What would HNers change in Win2k to bring it up-to-date? What's must have features does Windows 11 have that Win2k does not?

Modern desktops do multi-display and scaling better. Perhaps also GPU-work, however I greatly prioritize low latency over any fancy windowing.

I wonder how the Windows 2000 desktop latency was? I remember it felt really snappy.

If it had updated security patches, drivers for modern hardware, and a modern web browser, I'd seriously consider using Windows 2000 as my daily driver today. Windows 2000 was peak Windows for me. It was stable, and the desktop did not get in my way. It's Windows without the bloat, the nagging, and the surveillance. I loved it in the early 2000's, preferred it to XP (which introduced activation, the Fisher-Price theme, and some nagging), and still love it to this day. I periodically check the progress of ReactOS (https://reactos.org), since this is the closest thing to this vision of an updated Windows 2000.

While I'm at it, I'd be very productive with 2000-era productivity software, such as Microsoft Office 2000 and the Adobe software of that era. Of course, I'd need updated compilers and other developer tools since I'd like to work with modern languages.

As it seems everyone else here thinks win2k was peak windows. I agree. It was the best windows there ever was. I will miss it always. In 2000 I originally ran win98 and then 2k as a router so I could share my parents adsl connection with my bro. Ah! Memories! Crazy that I could hook up a windows box back then and not get hacked. The internet then was a different time.....

Edit: spelling

Truly great OS. The pinnacle. Rock solid. Just look at that perfectly consistent UI. Everything afterwards is bloat and UI BS.

What a cool project. Expose that port 3389 (RDP) to the internet & see how long before it gets cryptolocked.

Finally! We've been waiting for Windows containers to hit feature parity with Linux for a long time! /s

Lol. Gave me a good chuckle!

Did anyone frequently run into ntoskrnl errors that prevented Windows 2000 from booting? I ran into that error every six months but to be fair a number of the incidents happened after a power failure with no UPS.

Was it the IDE reg tweak to fix it? (Search mergeide.reg or something). That was a common issue when hardware swapped.

Inside the image for those interested: https://contains.dev/hectormolinero/qemu-win2000

I was completely obsessed with Terminal Services and the powers therein

I'd like to use or build something like this for vintage gaming.

Is booting windows in a vm something noteworthy in 2021?

yea I don't get it... I have docker/qemu images for every windows version ever made, but I don't go parading them around to everyone. they're so simple to make anyways.

I was searching for your question. I agree I don't know why this is in the first page... Maybe some people [1] are right when they say most of HN's audience is interested in business and technology, but not technical themselves.

[1] http://n-gate.com/

I think people don't realise that Docker isn't really doing anything here.

What happened to ngate? Have they ever been on a long hiatus like this one before?

https://twitter.com/webshitweekly/status/1450563491069247489

I really wish docker (not specifically but containers frameworks) had support for graphical output. Be really cool to containerise visual apps.

You can do it, I've done it, for the express purpose of GUI apps in containers. You have to mount in a Xwindows socket. There's info out there how to do it.

They can-- I know someone who runs xorg in a container with SPICE output support, but not sure on the specifics.

I suggest that you look up x11docker.

I miss W2K :(

#becausejurassicparkreference - https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-win2000#why

so it runs Ubuntu which fires up a virtual machine that runs windows. Why not run the VM directly without Ubuntu !? (and without Docker)

You can of course set this up manually outside Docker, I provide this image so that you can easily have a preconfigured installation with VNC, RDP, bind shell and a Samba server.

Is something like this considered pirating?

Amazing

But, Why?

Why not? It’s fun.

I like to boot up old operating systems for UI design inspiration. Software really felt different back then. This sort of “pointless” project saves me a lot of hassle!

Is it that hard to do directly using QEMU? https://wiki.qemu.org/Windows2000

I think thats basically all this is.. qemu inside a container?

Yes, and just this time for windows 2k, an OS can bring some nostalgia for certain folks.

No it’s not that hard. But this lets me do it with a single command. No need to track down a disk image with a working key, configure the VM, and then run the slow installer. With this I can go do whatever silly thing I wanted to do that much faster.

Because a project like this is the exact ethos that HN thrives on and the niche that 'Hacker' community exists to fill.

I would love to see 100 of these a day.

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