JSI Tip 6118. Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP implementation details white paper.

The Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP implementation details white paper contains:

Summary

This white paper describes the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system TCP/IP implementation details, and is a supplement to the Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP manuals. The Microsoft TCP/IP protocol suite is examined from the bottom up. Throughout the paper, network traces are used to illustrate key concepts. These traces were gathered and formatted using Microsoft Network Monitor, a software-based protocol tracing and analysis tool included in the Microsoft Systems Management Server product. The intended audience for this paper is network engineers and support professionals who are already familiar with TCP/IP.

Microsoft has adopted TCP/IP as the strategic enterprise network transport for its platforms. In the early 1990s, Microsoft started an ambitious project to create a TCP/IP stack and services that would greatly improve the scalability of Microsoft networking. With the release of the  Windows NT® 3.5 operating system, Microsoft introduced a completely rewritten TCP/IP stack. This new stack was designed to incorporate many of the advances in performance and ease of administration that were developed over the past decade. The stack is a high-performance, portable 32-bit implementation of the industry-standard TCP/IP protocol. It has evolved with each version of Windows NT to include new features and services and to enhance performance and reliability.

The goals in designing the TCP/IP stack were to make it:

The TCP/IP suite for Windows 2000 was designed to make it easy to integrate Microsoft systems into large-scale corporate, government, and public networks while providing the ability to operate over those networks in a secure manner. Windows 2000 is an Internet-ready operating system.