Show HN: Windows 2000 on Docker

This brings back great memories. Windows 2000 sparked my interest in computing.<p>I was in elementary school and was obsessed with the &#x27;Log on to&#x27; dropdown box on Windows login screens, and how you could use the same credentials on any PC.<p>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&#x27;s laptop to the domain.<p>I went and asked the IT guy for advice on doing a multi forest configuration and I think it blew his mind. Why did I want multi forest? Guess I was preoccupied with whether or not I could, and didn&#x27;t stop to think if I should. : )

I just ran this on a Fedora machine and connected to Windows using rdesktop. It works and it&#x27;s amazing. I like it. The Internet will surely be confused today with a surge of traffic from Internet Explorer 5. Incidentally, google.com still loads and allows searching; bing.com does not load.

Windows 2000 was my favorite version of the OS. I kept it running far longer than I should reasonably have. Thanks for giving me another reason to fire it up!

I actually cut my sysadmin teeth on Windows 2000, and found myself wondering how on earth they could `docker exec` a shell. These were, comparatively, the dark ages of Windows administration, and almost all tasks were done through a GUI.<p>The implementation is nothing short of genius: they use a Windows version of `netcat` (the common UNIX tool, but compiled for Windows from the Windows 2000 Resource Kit), then use `srvany` (also from the Windows 2000 Resource Kit) to start `netcat` as a system service, but with `cmd.exe` piped to its standard in and out.<p>Kudos on this solution!

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&#x2F;pro&#x2F;workstation editions of windows and used server... Gave more features I needed, like hyper v, and felt more stable... Plus less crap...

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.<p>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.

&gt; Why?<p>&gt;&gt; &quot;Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn&#x27;t stop to think if they should.&quot; - Dr. Ian Malcolm<p>I like this &quot;Why?&quot; &quot;Why not?&quot; attitude. Surprised though that a whole operating system, kernel and all, is dockerised though, especially that the impression of Docker to me is that it is normally everything but the kernel.<p>Edit: I didn&#x27;t read the QEMU in the name. I won&#x27;t be surprised if this is a full software emulation though (instead of the now-common hardware-assisted virtualisation).

Ahh how I truly miss being super focused:<p><pre><code> win2k pro winamp 2.92 (and all its glorious plugins. still use it today!!!) jasc paint shop pro 7 jcreator ide ati TV wonder firewire ethernet that network activity icon amd k-6 processor 384MB ram a consistent UI powertoys gpedit tweaks ms-word (and yes I rather enjoyed clipit) </code></pre> Vs today where every piece of modern software fights with you to get work down. There are some exceptions but the list is rather small now.

Questions about this implementation&#x27;s legality? Liability? Security?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hectorm&#x2F;docker-qemu-win2000&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Dockerfile.m4#L50" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hectorm&#x2F;docker-qemu-win2000&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;D...</a><p>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

2000 and XP&#x2F;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).

cool! I&#x27;ve never considered running qemu in a container. This project is a matroska on actual windows systems, as docker runs&#x2F;used to run in VM (has WSL changed that?). So VM-&gt;Docker-&gt;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

Docker can run Win 2000, but older versions of Win 10 can&#x27;t run Docker. There must be some irony here.

(comment is a little off-topic, feel free to downvote)<p>I&#x27;m curious how ReactOS stacks up to Windows 2000.

In general: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;tianon&#x2F;qemu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;tianon&#x2F;qemu</a>

Best MS OS, they should have just maintained this for the last 20 years.

This is qemu on docker. just so happens to be that a windows 2000 is running on the qemu..

Windows 2000 running in VM in Docker. Might as well skip the docker stage as it does not really add anything.<p>Otherwise sweet memories. I used Win 2K as a workstation at the time. Loved it.

This is amazing! Does anyone know if KVM hardware virt works on EC2 &#x2F; ECS &#x2F; Lambda &#x2F; other cloud or VPS vendors?<p>Also, does anyone know which versions of Windows have restrictions on where you can run it? IIRC, recent versions stipulate you can&#x27;t just run your own copy of it virtualized without an approved hardware vendor? Or maybe I&#x27;m crazy. I know with MacOS the EULA states you can&#x27;t run it on anything but Apple hardware (thanks, Apple).<p>If only their EULAs weren&#x27;t so restrictive, it would be easy to spin up a build+test cluster for your apps for all platforms. Sucks that developing cross-platform is now legally&#x2F;financially more troublesome than it is technically.

This reminds me of a job I had about 13 years ago. I worked for a startup called SafeDesk. The idea was that we created custom debian-based live images that we network (PXE) booted to diskless PCs. So naturally the system would be instantly &quot;wiped&quot; when rebooted. We sold this to a few libraries and schools and even prisons.<p>Somehow we got into running vmware player with Windows 7 (?) on those diskless systems because of course some customers wanted windows. We PXE booted linux and then ran windows on it through vmware. It was insane and pretty stupid and terribly slow, but I learned a shitload about linux from that job.

I wish there was an easy way to mux display usage to containers sor hat things like these wouldn&#x27;t need to run an RDP server for you to access the and we could have `--display window=640x480` or `--monitor &#x2F;dev&#x2F;....`.

A year or so before Windows XP brought the NT kernel to home users, I chose to switch from Windows Me to 2000 to reap the benefits in computer stability. I was using a business operating system before it was cool.

I got my first laptop in the year 2000, it was a hand me down and weighed like three bricks but I loved it so much. In the next year I found out the high school decommissioned computer parts and started picking them up and building working machines at home.<p>The hardest thing in setting up a local area network at home for me was finding a router (we were poor and I couldn&#x27;t just buy it). But I did get hold of a crossover cable and was able to set up a LAN running win 2k between two machines.<p>That made me at least as happy as watching Angelina Jolie play Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.

A handful of PCs running pirated Win2k licenses and Small Business Server 2003, hooked up via an eBay Cisco switch was the start of my career in Ops. I learned so much back then!

I love the speed and simplicity of Win2k.<p>What would HNers change in Win2k to bring it up-to-date? What&#x27;s must have features does Windows 11 have that Win2k does not?

As it seems everyone else here thinks win2k was peak windows. I agree. It was the best windows there ever was. I will miss it always. In 2000 I originally ran win98 and then 2k as a router so I could share my parents adsl connection with my bro. Ah! Memories! Crazy that I could hook up a windows box back then and not get hacked. The internet then was a different time.....<p>Edit: spelling

Truly great OS. The pinnacle. Rock solid. Just look at that perfectly consistent UI. Everything afterwards is bloat and UI BS.

What a cool project. Expose that port 3389 (RDP) to the internet &amp; see how long before it gets cryptolocked.

Finally! We&#x27;ve been waiting for Windows containers to hit feature parity with Linux for a long time! &#x2F;s

Did anyone frequently run into ntoskrnl errors that prevented Windows 2000 from booting? I ran into that error every six months but to be fair a number of the incidents happened after a power failure with no UPS.

Inside the image for those interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contains.dev&#x2F;hectormolinero&#x2F;qemu-win2000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contains.dev&#x2F;hectormolinero&#x2F;qemu-win2000</a>

I was completely obsessed with Terminal Services and the powers therein

I&#x27;d like to use or build something like this for vintage gaming.

Is booting windows in a vm something noteworthy in 2021?

I really wish docker (not specifically but containers frameworks) had support for graphical output. Be really cool to containerise visual apps.

I miss W2K :(

#becausejurassicparkreference - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hectorm&#x2F;docker-qemu-win2000#why" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hectorm&#x2F;docker-qemu-win2000#why</a>

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

Is something like this considered pirating?

Amazing

But, Why?