Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_69 | Hacker News Reader

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. : )

View on HN

> 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.

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 :)

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.

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com