Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Installing a new Windows 2000 box in 2014

Sometimes, you just have to do it. You know that upstanding citizens would frown upon you. Your friends tell you it's not worth the risk. Your spouse looks at you in horror. But you still can't escape, you have to do it. You have to do a fresh install of Windows 2000, even in 2014.

In my case, it was a legacy printing system which doesn't even play ball with XP. The SP4 installation went fine onto a HP dc5100 SFF, drivers loaded okay, the printers and the print software installed without problems. Test pages were printed, but Windows 7 clients couldn't access the box. My guess was the lack of NTLMv2 support, or possibly outdated CA certs. No problem, Windows Update to the rescue.

Or not, as Windows Update does not work on a fresh install of Windows 2000, which comes with IE 5.0. Explorer 5 only supports DES encryption, which is kinda obsolete, I'm not sure if you can even access the Windows Update website with it anymore. The order of the day was the following:

Google for a full installer of IE 6.0 (not SP1); I found one on oldapps.com:
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff  77M 2014-01-15 11:25 ie60.exe



The small web installer on the MS download site will fail, so you'll need the full installer. It should install fine, reboot.
The downloads from now on mostly came from download.microsoft.com. First off a root CA pack from 2009:
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 312K 2014-01-15 11:25 rootsupd.exe

Next off was an update rollup, just to cut back on the downloads:
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff  32M 2014-01-15 11:25 Windows2000-KB891861-v2-x86-ENU.EXE

And finally the Windows Update client 3.0 update:
-rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 5.9M 2014-01-15 11:25 Windowsupdateagent30-x86.exe

A few reboots later you should be able to access the Windows Update site and download about a 100 updates, more if you installed .net and/or Office.

As for modern browsers: IE6 SP1 is the max, forget Chrome, and Firefox can go up to version 12.
On the bright side: Windows 2000 is seriously fast on modern hardware...