Many activities that can be done in Windows 98/ME as well will not be duplicated here just to save the space and the time. These activities can be found under Configuring Windows 98.
Configuring the SIS Space Groveler
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That is its name. The Single Instance Store is an interesting tool that is included only with the RIS service of the Windows 2000 Server (See Installing and Configuring RIS) It can be so handy that it might be a good idea to install RIS on a server even if the RIS service itself (for performing full installations of Windows 2000 Professional across the network) is never used. After installing RIS on the server, the SIS Space Groveler service will be up and running in the background. What it does is this: it scours the drive that RIS was configured to use for storing the "images" of Windows 2000 Professional for duplicate files. The images are actually the full I386 folders for Windows 2000 Prrofessional. Since the RIS service can store any number of these "images" and each one is going to contain many thousands of files almost all of which are the same exact file, SIS will find these and move a Single Instance to its common Store folder (hence the name) and replace the originals with stubs that act like shortcuts to the store folder. These stubs are not shortcuts in the conventional sense of the term, the system thinks they are the real file and when executed they execute the actual file from the store at the machine language level. This is why SIS should never be allowed to mess with the operating system folder (C:\WINNT) or there will certainly be trouble. Since the SIS space groveler runs at the volume or partition level this is why RIS must use another partition to store the remote installation "images" and the replacement stubs only work in the NTFS file system. This means that any folders created on the RIS partition will automatically enjoy the SIS effect. Any duplicate files will automatically be spotted by SIS and then be moved into the SIS store folder and be replaced by a stub that will launch the original. Any attempt to copy the stub will also result in the copying of the original from the store instead. The SIS Space Groveler can be told to act on any other drive letter on the system also. It is recommended to stay away from the C: drive because RIS refuses to install to there because of the problems that can occur with the operating system kernel itself. If SIS replaces a DLL with a stub, expect a very fast blue screen and a terrible time in Recovery Console trying to sort it out. Assuming that there is a data F: drive on the system, this is how to get SIS to work on it:
- It must be formatted NTFS - SIS checks all local NTFS drives as it starts up for the following conditions.
- It must have a hidden directory in the root of the drive named "SIS Common Store" - Open the root of the F: drive, create the folder and then right click it and check the hidden property, Apply and OK.
- That folder must have a file in it named "MaxIndex" - Open notepad and save a new empty file into the folder named MaxIndex and make sure it is capitalized exactly like this and has no extension.
That's all. SIS will now scour the drive constantly and when it spots a duplicate file it will copy it to the store folder and replace the duplicates with the fake stubs and thereby save storage space on the drive.
To prevent SIS from delving into a particular folder and making replacements open REGEDT32 and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Groveler\ExcludedPaths
Create a new value within this key with any name of data type REG_SZ. Make the data equal to the path to be excluded from "space groveling" Example: Value name = IgnoreMyFiles and the Data = \MyFiles The drive letter must not be specified. Whenever SIS finds a folder by this name in any root of any partition that has the store directory on it, it will not perform any space groveling replacements inside of it.
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