The tools, or hacks in this book reveal techniques that go well beyond basic management tasks found in most handbooks. Hacks range from those that deal with general administration to more esoteric hacks in the areas of network deployment, patch management, performance, security, and backup and recovery. No matter which Windows Server you use–NT, IIS, 2000, or 2003–Windows Server Hacks will put the knowledge and expertise of veteran system administrators to work for you.
For some time now, Microsoft Windows (in all its incarnations) has been the dominant desktop operating system for businesses small and large. But in recent years, the platform has also made significant inroads into the server side of the equation. In the late 1990s, for example, the now-legacy Windows NT 4.0 Server platform became popular for running web servers using IIS and largely displaced Novell NetWare in the file/print server arena. Other server applications that ran on top of NT, such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server, also made Windows a top platform for messaging/collaboration and database servers.