Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker (opens in new tab)

> 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. :-)

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:)

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

> 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.

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.

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 was always a fan of NT4, personally speaking.

How is the compatibility with everyday applications?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I agree too! It's the BEST!

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.

Seems like this runs qemu inside the container.

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.

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

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/

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.

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!

Why not? It’s fun.

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

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

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...

WSL2 itself also runs in a VM

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

>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" ;-))

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.

Lol. Gave me a good chuckle!

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

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.