NT4 and All That.....

BassdudeNZ · **Joined:** Thu Sep 08, 2016 10:10 pm **Posts:** 151

nexter wrote:

BassdudeNZ wrote:

I run two versions of Windows 11 on two machines.
One is the last version of Insider and the latest on the other which runs my DAW. Winstep is on Insider which is not only more stable, it shows no sign of issues. I believe this to be because it is halfway between Win10 and what was officially released.
I also run Stop Updates 10 on it.

On the updating DAW machine, I create a restore file daily. It means I can theoretically undo and stop anything which is nasty. I have done that twice now. One was an exceptionally ugly .NET update and the other put my booting on an endless cycle.

I agree. By now they really do not have any excuses. They have had more than enough years to get it right since the joke of WINNT 4.

Oh hang on a minute. I really can't agree that Win NT4 was a joke - it was the first workable version of NT, and even for the average consumer a better option than the pathetic hybrid 8/16/32-bit Win 95. NTFS also proved fairly robust for the time compared to older 3.51. That said I still preferred running OPENSTEP 4.1/4.2 (and Solaris) - even though Jobs sold us NeXT users out. Of course, NT4 also had the, for some of us at least, distinct advantage of being able to run OPENSTEP Enterprise, the Openstep frameworks and environments to support O'step apps and the full dev environment. The biggest irony of course is that the Win 95 style GUI was a rip-off (initially, later licensed between mates Bill G. and Jobs) of the NeXT GUI code, just with a different visual appearance and slightly different metaphors.

What was a joke though were the updates - I'm happy to say though that I avoided them.

Ok, I figure then you must be at least within ten years of my age? Considering the Networks I was using were Novell 3,4 then 5, yes, WINNT4 was a security joke then, totally. Novell even released NDIS for WINNT4 to up the security.

Come Active Directory in 2000 which was clearly a clone of Novell Directory Services with still faulty inherited rights, WINNT4 was a joke and anyone who worked on Novell and saw how often the MS online servers at the end of the 90s got hacked easily would not disagree. They got better but still, if you only have access five sub-directories down even now on AD, you can see every directory above and event monitors wonder why there are so many 'no access' attempts in the logs. In Novell, as far back as Novell 4, if you were five sub-directories down, all you could see was the 1st folder in a client and the fifth. It is still flawed.

nexter · **Posted:** Tue Oct 11, 2022 4:01 am

As regards my age - you may like to think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

Don't know yours so it would be futile guessing, either way, either one of us.

Suffice it to say, I started on 8 bit, used BBSes back then, eventually came to the Amigas when they came along and then NeXT machines when the colour ones came, continued using the hardware till the early noughties but also ran Openstep on own-built PCs from about '95, and also worked on SGI and Sun workstations....

Yes, security under NT 3.x and 4 was a disaster, certainly in a networking environment, but then I was using it as a (part time) workstation while also multi-booting as well as using other machines as mentioned. And it was not only configured to within an inch of its life and protected with the best firewall of the time as well as a multitude of small security add-ons, which all in all proved reasonably secure with only limited internet use.

Of course, for ultimate security there was then and still is only one option - Unix and Unix-like OSes. That's why Linux has been my main OS for some years, and additionally I use a firewall just in case, as well as the best and most secure VPN that money can buy - Proton - which I have on all my devices and OSes. (Privacy is every bit as important to me as security and should be so to everyone.)

As we've strayed a bit far off topic in the last posts, I'm splitting the last two and moving them to the 'Off Topic' forum.

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NT4 and All That.....