Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

github.com

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#111
post #101

Questions about this implementation's legality? Liability? Security? https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-win2000/blob/master/D... Makes me think this is done as a POC, but definitely fork a local copy as you can just swap that line out with your local copy of a Win2k ISO

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

During the installation I add Netcat to have a bind shell, this way you can get a CMD shell from Linux using the "vmshell" command included in the image.

So yes, technically it's backdoored but only for yourself :)

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#112
post #52

cool! I've never considered running qemu in a container. This project is a matroska on actual windows systems, as docker runs/used to run in VM (has WSL changed that?). So VM->Docker->VM. You could probably also run windows-something that supports Docker and run the same image. Oh this gives me baaaaad ideas. Thank you, OP

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...

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#113
2000 and XP/2003 were the last Windows versions I used and cared about. It was with 2000 that I realised working with 2 200MHz CPUs was a better experience than a single 400MHz one (at least on Windows).

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google looks at your user agent and doesn't redirect to https if it's an old browser.

Isn't this a security vulnerability?

It wouldn't be surprising if they did that so people could download a newer browser (such as Chrome...) which would itself be signed anyway.

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#116
post #42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree. People often forget that early releases of XP was basically just a re-skinned 2000 but with a few tweaks for games and fonts. The problem was those skins ended up doubling the memory and CPU requirements. In fact XP was a pretty bloated OS on hardware from 2002. It wasn’t until much later into the life of XP when hardware caught up and newer service packs added enough to the OS to really differentiate it fro…

I’d go even further: XP was 2000 with some UI elements and ideas that came from Windows Me. That grouping in the control panel only made it harder to find what you needed.

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#117

I really liked how stable W2k was as a workstation. I could run a bunch of terminals, programs and hardly ever had a crash. Nothing is worse working an outage or deployment and POOF there goes your desktop. This was also around the time you could even run bbwin and themes, and tweak it some for fun. Pretty sure cygwin was also around.

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

Cygwin was a wonderful thing. It wasn’t fast, but integrated the Linux side with the Windows side much better than WSL2 does (at the expense of binary compatibility). It allowed me to develop server apps for Linux on a corporate sanctioned Windows box and deploy them to the real servers (mostly Linux with some Solaris).

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#118
post #103

so it runs Ubuntu which fires up a virtual machine that runs windows. Why not run the VM directly without Ubuntu !? (and without Docker)

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.

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#119
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driver support isn't a given. There's lots of normal hardware which may never be server qualified. You can make a desktop that will run server fine, but it's kind of a Linux situation; you can't pick random parts and assume they'll work.

I have yet to run into this problem, do you have any examples? I don’t have any exotic hardware outside of the ThinkPad X220 dock which nowadays only works with Linux.

Thinkpads are a good bet for Linux compatibility because they are very popular with Red Hat and Ubuntu kernel developers. They’ll do whatever it takes to make Linux run well on their machines.

Re: Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

#120
post #27
post #6

Someone posted that 2k was the last nt edition without bloat... I think that was wrong (plus comment seems to have been deleted). 2k3, 2k8, 2k8r2, 2k12, 2k12r2, 2016 and 2019 all have no bloat or random crap... 2022 is mostly the same.... And comes with (chrome) edge too... Since the xp days I have always skipped the home/pro/workstation editions of windows and used server... Gave more features I needed, like hyper v…

I was always a fan of NT4, personally speaking.

NT4 blue screened on me when I was demoing IIS process separation. It was an auditorium full of very technical people, who mostly already knew me from one place or another. Fortunately, I was quite good as a stand up comedian.

I felt vindicated when 98 did the same with billg at COMDEX (or was it CES?).

NT4 had an architectural flaw that was introduced to make some people happier - many device drivers started to run in kernel space and their bugs were able to crash the whole machine, unlike 3.5, where a crashed driver could be reloaded.

Post reply on HN