
Windows Server 2003 Is A Small Step Forward 584
b17bmbr writes "According to eWeek, 'The release of Windows Server 2003 is a small step forward for the platform -- an effort that really should be considered Windows 2000 Server Second Edition. With the exception of Internet Information Services 6.0, there aren't any far-reaching or fundamental changes in the product.' And from CNet Microsoft prepares Windows Server ads, 'The ads are geared toward IT managers on tight budgets.' This is probably Microsoft's last chance to turn the tide and take mindset and market share from FOSS."
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh no!
Things don't sound so good for those poor guys at Microsoft! I better sell my stock!
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
There hasn't been a technical revolution anyway The revolution has been in licensing and using the Internet as a development environment. The technical work is all evolutionary, small steps.
In proprietary software, you create the appearance of a revolution by giving something old a new name. You can't see the source so you can't see that it's nothing knew.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux around in 20 or even 30 years, and I'm sure DOS and VMS will be with us too.
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Interesting)
I was discussing the problem of BIND security the other day. I explained that things had been better for a long time until DNSSEC came along and a whole slew of completely unchecked code had just got jammed into the kernel. This led to the observation that unglamorous stuff like testing is something that it is realy hard to get people to do for OSS projects. Especially since there is someth
Re:Oh no! tsarkon reports (Score:5, Interesting)
Before you all laugh; I was using this to verify if the OS can better handle SYN floods, etc. Let me tell you, FreeBSD and Linux are many times better at handling malformed ingress attack traffic, from SYN, to UDP and ICMP floods, stuff like trinoo / tfn2k / neptune / skydance / etc. Even with syn cookies and the various types of protections shut off, FreeBSD and Linux are many, many times more robust in handling bad traffic.
I would also like to point out that CNET is going to push this crap like crazy (Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft is a major stakeholder in CNET)
I don't believe that this is a minor facelift. This OS (5.2) is appreciably faster than NT 5.1 (XP - excretion product, if anyone used XP over 2000 for any reason they have severe brain damage). 5.1 is a bad expermient. This is a major overhaul in a lot of ways. I still think IIS is not very good. Version 6, 7 whatever - Apache 2.0 is free, opensource, and despite what Zeinfeld says, I see a lot less problems with using Apache than IIS. Sorry. But anyone who claims 5.2 is a minor change from 5.0 is smoking crack. This isn't a service pack.
And the nail in the coffin for Windows 2003? No SSH, no REAL command line configurability and remote control. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to get a real implementation of RDP, called Citrix, which is rather good and ungodly expensive, buy terminal server licenses and citrix seats and CALs and all this crap for a SAMBA share creator with horrible remote manageability. Windows zealots can take the MMC and the snap ins that can be used remotely, remote manageability, administrative packs, terminal services, RDP, remote registry service and Run As and shove it. It is 50 fucking times harder to act as root on a windows box when you arent on the screen logged in.
The OS is a bastard version of VMS. Its that simple. Microsoft should port SQL and Exhcange to other platforms. They should give up on IIS and embrace apache. I am not annoyed one way or the other by SQL, Exchange or
Microsoft has to accept facts. Juniper puts FreeBSD on its godly routers and not NT based crap or Linux for very good reason. Looks are a distraction! Does this stuff WORK? Is it useful, change-able, tunable code that is well documented and self-documenting? Is it mired with ridiculous licensing? The Microsoft EULA and the GPL must have competitions on being the weirdest license ever.
So, I ask all you Windows NT people. You XPers and you Win2003ers. Yeah, you won the browser war hands down - for now. For me it is easier to play games, do my "stuff" and browse with Windows. But do any of you really really believe in this piece of garbage for Servers? I mean fucking c'mon. This god damn tangled mess with fucking DRIVE LETTERS. No real sense of root. No well documented function to do "ln -s" (It's called joining - you can get a utility to do it with reskit, but its a hard link that cannot cleanly traverse drive letters or DFS mounts). No real way to do diskless or dumb clients unless you add citrix. TCP/IP implementation is curiously more expensive than it is on Unix clones and less able to handle attacks. Its rudely expensive with its CAL model. It seeks to proprietize the interoperable (Samba, Domain, LDAP, Kerberos, even HTML is bastardized). It cannot be easily "rescued" like unixes can. Fuck a trashed Unix box is so easy to fix, particularly if you are willing to start over.
Windows server zealots piss me off because they live a lie. They think this crap is more modern and better?
Fo shizzle my nizzle zealots.
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Will Microsoft survive? Sure.
Will Microsoft lose their domination? Yes, they will, eventually.
As an investor, I see Microsoft as a company that has very much to lose and not much to gain. (On the desktop, the only place where things are going reasonable well for MS, there is no room to grow and everywhere else they are losing. But also on the desktop, especially OpenOffice is starting to eat their
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too late! (Score:2, Insightful)
That would make it "a good time to buy".
Re:Too late! (Score:4, Insightful)
MSFT P/E == 28.98. That's high for a producer of a commodity product. OSes and office suites aren't rocket science anymore.
Re:Too late! (Score:5, Informative)
Experience DRM with MS-Server 2003 (Score:4, Insightful)
Either problem alone would scare potential buyers, so it seems to be forbidden [infoworld.com] to discuss.
It would be convenient to skip the upcoming deluge of advertisements [zdnet.co.uk] and astroturf and see trade magazines feature the F/OSS tools instead. Ads cost a fortune and MS could instead use the money to 1) hire developers to rewrite software in a secure, stable form, 2) hire lawyers for the upcoming willful negligence lawsuits.
pssh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is probably Microsoft's last chance to turn the tide and take mindset and market share from FOSS.
please. they have $30 billion in cash. i think they'll be able to buy some other chances.
Re:pssh (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, they only have $5.6 B in cash. The other $37.9 B is in "short term investments," according to Yahoo [yahoo.com]. :-)
Re:$52,931,000,000 is essentially equal to cash. (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty interesting web site. I guess the basic premise is that every problem that MS fixes is listed as a "Bad Thing (tm)" on that site.
Quite an original take on the anti-MS agenda- havent seen that one done before, like on, say, Slashdot, on like, well, every day.
FOSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:FOSS? (Score:5, Informative)
Just a guess.
Re:FOSS? (Score:3, Informative)
It's an acronym to assuage those people who for some inexplicable reason prefer "free software" over OSS. So we get FOSS. (Aside: Then of course there's FLOSS, Free / Libre / Open Source Software, which is popular amongst those who know some french, because Libre means "freedom" in french.
(AsideAside: french actually has two words for free. One is libre, which means freedom. The other is gratis, which means gratis
Re:FOSS? (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is to clarify that is free, because there is the idea of nonfree open source software. Though I think nonfree may be considered "shared source" these days.
Re:FOSS? (Score:5, Funny)
*rimshot*
Re:FOSS? (Score:4, Funny)
But then people would say stuff like "Red Hat is BS" which might be slightly confusing.
FOSS is such a sh*tty name (Score:3, Funny)
so we are paying for a service pack? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:so we are paying for a service pack? (Score:2, Funny)
A few more updates they don't touch on (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A few more updates they don't touch on (Score:3, Interesting)
New version of MSMQ with a bunch of added features. New enhancements to the COM+ application server side to enhance performance and stability. etc.
Ability to deploy the server using RIS and other similar TCO improvements. It's also faster on the same hardware.
It's a fairly extensive evolutionary change. It'd be like going from Redhat 5.0 to Redhat 9.0. Yeah it doesn't look different, but looks are deceiving.
The most important update is probably: (Score:5, Informative)
There is also the "restore from media" option that lets you build *new* DCs from the system state backup of an old DC. Previously, you couldn't do that, and bringing up a new DC meant running dcpromo and replicating all the data from the various domains. Big deal you say? An HP IT department had to sync a new DC that was also a global catalog over a WAN line. It took 3 DAYS just for the replication. Obviously this will save some serious amounts of time.
Re:The most important update is probably: (Score:5, Interesting)
They also stuck an http listener at the kernel level. It doesn't do anything except listen for http requests, and line up those requests in a queue. It is this way so that if IIS is restarted, clients are not disconnected.
The other difference (available in win2k) is the .NET ASP handling. Since ASP.NET pages are very much like java servlets, they become objects that can be handled in a separate process, on a separate machine. This is basically a clone of those J2EE Application Servers, but with .NET integrated to the core into the OS, the performace difference is astounding.
I'm no MS fan, mind you, but they've taken the J2EE idea, and refined it for performance benefits. When you make some benchmarks, side by side with code that's exactly the same, you'll see that .NET is probably much faster than J2EE. Sorry... but the JVM is running with lower process priority than .NET, and does not have the integration that .NET has.
Some say that integration is a bad thing. Some say it is a good thing. Me? I really don't give a shit now. I used to be all for the separation of code, drawing a distinction between the System and the OS proggies. I admire the Unix philosophy of stringing together a bunch of tiny programs to accomplish something more complex. I've also seen the performance benefits of an integrated system (monolithic kernel anyone? ahem), and why not take it a step further. As long as MS is there to blame for their security problems (which there will be plenty, undoubtedly), I don't see why people should turn down their product. It's built for the sole purpose of serving web pages very quickly, and very reliably.
I think MS finally pulled their heads out of their asses and realized that they weren't getting anywhere with the shitty-assed ASP, nor were they going anywhere with a server that cut everyone's connection if something went wrong. I like statefulness, I like the technology of J2EE. I also think that MS put a lot of effort into making .NET server (oh whatever, 2003) a very competitive product. All they have going against it is their reputation, and the fact that they have next to nothing as far as market share in the web server business.
Re:so we are paying for a service pack? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been an MS hater for a long time (sellin' commercial UNIX solutions), but honestly, there is a lot of compelling tech wrapped up in this that will pay off big in SOME environments.
will pay off big in SOME environments (Score:3, Funny)
Wouldn't you also agree that for those looking to move from NT4, that they could also see a big ROI if they moved to OSS instead? If yes, why would you try to sell a MS solution here, without mentioning that?
Not the first time they did that (Score:2, Insightful)
It's lousy from a consumer standpoint, but enough people thought it worthwhile to buy it and make it profitable for Microsoft.
It's not the most upstanding business strategy, but it still makes them money. And any business is not in it for the ethics, but about the cold hard cash.
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:4, Interesting)
True but not true. Microsoft has a habit of releasing hundreds of little "upgrades" pieces at a time such that one doesn't even realize all that has changed: Compare a stock Windows 98SE machine with 98SE with updated Media Player, IE, Messenger, etc. At some point these teams have to derive revenue so they package all of the "free" upgrades together and make it a new OS. They are actually delivering a lot of value, it just happens to be devalued by the fact that it's free for older OS' as well.
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:5, Funny)
And it took 2 years for anyone to notice because , lets face it, win95 got rebooted a whole lot more often than that because of all the other bugs.
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's 2^32 milliseconds, or 49 days and 17 hours. I ran my Win95 unpatched because I wanted to see it. One time I waited 48 days before I got some other "regular" crash. I never got more than 4 weeks uptime after that.
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:4, Informative)
If you were to actually be stupid enough to do this, the first time you had a problem with your MS setup you would be thrown to the wolves, otherwise known as per-incident support and you would land there without a support budget.
For Win 2003 standard the support page is available here [microsoft.com] and in short it's $245 per incident and $1225 for a 5 pack.
The problem with buying that 5 pack of incidents is that it's only good for win2k3 incidents. Unlike the RH support which covers many products, each prepaid pack is only good for the covered product.
You get to have 48 incidents over 6 years (assuming prices do not change) or 8 incidents per year. RH does not set incident limits in its standard support contracts.
If only 8 things go wrong per year in a 6 server MS shop in both server OS and server apps, you're having a very good year. To expect to have 6 very good years in a row is not very probable.
The RH offering costs you $600 per year but each year you get updated to the then current major release. Since MS updates their OS about every 2 years, that's $6k of software cost that hasn't been accounted for to keep things even and that drops you down on the MS end to 4 incidents per year across the OS and the relevant enterprise applications you'll be running. Good luck on having two major OS upgrades over 6 servers and only having 4 incidents per year.
Finally, before anybody starts whining about the free support options or MS' $99 online option they aren't comparable as RH is offering 4 hour support response time, not 24 hour and Linux forums exist with exactly the same price as the MS forums, free.
Re:Not the first time they did that (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not going to argue the price issue, but I will say this. I currently run 19 servers: 5 NT 4 and 14 Win2K. About half of the Win2k used to run NT 4 and were upgraded to 2k, the other 7 were fresh installed. I've had 12 of them up and running since 1998, the rest came online in early 2002. In all that time, I
IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone here run IIS and used these new text based conf files and can comment on them?
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:5, Insightful)
Having text-based configuration files would be a godsend for people in such a situation! It would also make creating an restore image of a server much easier since you only have to update the web content to the latest version in production.
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:2, Informative)
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:4, Informative)
adsutil is really pretty painless to use from a script. The metabase entries are pretty well documented thru MSDN, and one can usually use metaedit to learn more about how things change, etc.
What is it that you are trying to do? I imagine it might be a bit more difficult if you are trying to make changes thru the UI on one machine and then propogate that through... There are some utilities for that purpose.
But if you know exactly what changes you want to make, and then script those changes...(which you really should be doing anyway so you can rebuild your config from scratch if needed) it is trivial to execute that script against 10 different servers.
If you want help with configuring and managing IIS let me know. Just drop an email to anything at sodablue.org.
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:5, Informative)
Multiple sites can be stored in a single file, which is pretty handy. I was only able to import one site at a time though, which makes re-loading the server a bit painful if you have multiple sites on the same server.
Being text based makes it much easier to review configurations for errors and allows me to now use Perforce to track my changes with simple diffs. I wish more software used text based configuration files!
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as "multiple users go". That too can be wrapped around standardized, human readable files. Although most metadata will be specific to a particular user a
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:3, Informative)
IIS 6 really is a big deal for Windows... IIS 5 is a steaming pile of crap compared to Apache, but IIS 6 seems really promising. I'll hold out my opinion until I actually use it though... but it can't get much worse than IIS 5.
Re:IIS Text Configuration Files (Score:3, Funny)
Sure it can! IIS4
As an admin, what's the most noticable improvement from IIS4 to IIS5?
you can sort the list of websites. What the hell were they thinking?
Innovation (Score:2, Funny)
'The ads are geared toward (IT?) managers on.... (Score:4, Funny)
It will be:
'The ads are geared toward (IT?) managers on....
CRACK
Some bits on Windows Server 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)
As with Windows XP, it seems that Microsoft will be making additional components and add-ons available throughout the life of the product, including an updated version of SharePoint Team Services (which has been renamed to something I can't remember now) and currently unnamed components.
Personally, I think Windows Server 2003 is the latest salvo Microsoft has launched to get people out of Windows NT 4.0... just like how Windows XP was the latest salvo to get people out of Windows 9x/ME. It's an incremental step up from Windows 2000, but a much bigger step up from Windows NT 4.0.
That's my $0.01.
tight budgets??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows to compete with Linux...? c'mon. (Score:2, Informative)
Improvements (from an insider) (Score:5, Informative)
Kernel improvements:
* Low-Fragmentation Heap: People use SmartHeap because NT heap serializes and sucks. LFH heap uses heap-per-processor on SMP.
* Desktop Limit: Remember "running out of resources" before running out of memory in Win 3.1? The 32-bit analog of that limit (higher but still there) is STILL in Windows, even in XP. This keeps you from spawning thousands of processes IF those processes use any functions from user32.dll. They did some lazy registering of U/I threads vs. kernel threads that makes the limit less painful.
* Gigabit ethernet, zero-copy networking stuff. Don't know as much about this but that it's much better.
* Unisys ES7000 32-way blows f'ing chunks on W2K. It doesn't suck as much on 2K3 (NUMA API).
* Tons of other perf tuning adjustments, mostly to make SQL Server run better. All SQL Server-TPC-winning numbers have been on 2K3 betas for the last year or more.
* Junk like that. Dumb-ass bug fixes. It really is a better kernel, but it still sucks. As someone who now loves Linux, my honest assessment of the situation is, at best, the whole Linux (in its current state, mostly usability drawbacks) vs. Microsoft (usable as hell but stagnant due to lack of competition) is a draw. But Linux has more promise because its fresher and interesting. MS wins in business because business likes staid "comfortable" not necessarily better technology.
Re:Improvements (from an insider) (Score:5, Interesting)
The "NT kernel series" sucks when you try to port Unix-style thread or process per client model server software to it, because of the process limit I discussed and the VMS-like heaviweight processes. The ideal # of concurrent executing threads on 2K3 is one per processor, SQL Server and Exchange are modeled on this.
windows performance is like walking on a razor's edge: stray but a little and fall in the wayside. The amount of investment required to get performance is not commensurate with the payoff. This does not imply that I have found another kernel which doesn't suck!
Ah, the insight. (Score:3, Interesting)
Kernels do not suck. Kernels, if properly written (but not properly written kernels are hardly ever used in OS-es, except the win9x 'kernels'), do what was designed up-front. They have specs. If
Re:Ah, the insight. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhh... upgrades (Score:5, Funny)
Incremental is not always bad (Score:3)
They want what runs now, just do it better.
This ( arguably an improvement or not.. ) does just this.. its an incremental upgrade..
Not that *I* care personally either way, but its how a lot of the business world works.. and they dont like suprises..
Re:Incremental is not always bad (Score:2)
I mean, these guys have finally gotten all the bugs ironed out after those awful slammer patches, and everything is running smooth, and they're going to throw it all away? For what? Incremental advances? MS ALWAYS breaks compatibility. ALWAYS. Hell they do it with patches sometimes.
At this point, I'm only going to move off W2K when I get all my damn VB apps po
Um, no (Score:5, Informative)
The new IIS 6 comes in a super-secure default setup... allowing only
Plus it's pretty damn stable. My server has been running for about 60 days now... and it handles a decent amount of traffic.
I like the new Remote Desktop/terminal services. You can remote to the actual server console now, instead of starting a new TS session. The OS itself also seems faster than Windows 2000. I'm running it on a PII/350 w/ 256 MB ram and it screams.
It also comes with that HTTP.SYS kernel serving thingee for IIS, but I'm a strict believer that a web server doesn't belong in the kernel (this applies to Linux too).
So far my experiences have been all positive. How bout everyone else?
Re:Um, no (Score:3)
DAMN. so much for hacking IIS anymore. maybe i'll take up golf.
Re:Um, no (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. This was actually surprising to me - i thought it would be a bit slower on the same hardware than W2K server. But yes, it is faster (or maybe it's the fact that it's a newer box with less accumulated crud =)
Everything else is just icing on the cake, especially IIS 6.
Re:Um, no (Score:5, Funny)
*blink*
Advertisements built into music/videos? DRM? Locked to IP or user/pass combinations?
You're either astroturfing for Microsoft, or are using some definition of the word "awesome" of which I was previously unaware.
A step in the right direction (Score:2)
this release, including text-file-based configuration, much tighter
security defaults, user-level instead of administrator-level privileges,
and a kernel-mode HTTP request handler and cache.
Just wait for their next killer [mslinux.org] release.
One really cool feature (IMHO) (Score:2)
If your an IT manager on a tight budget... (Score:2, Funny)
super (Score:5, Funny)
good thing IIS has proven itself both secure and stable. otherwise, this could really be an issue:
IIS adds a number of Unix-style playing cards to its hand in this release, including text-file-based configuration, much tighter security defaults, user-level instead of administrator-level privileges, and a kernel-mode HTTP request handler and cache.
hackers, start your engines...
Re:super (Score:4, Informative)
I can see how moving a service like this into the kernel could have stability implications, but you didn't say anything about that
You obviously didn't read the first line of my post, so here it is again:
good thing IIS has proven itself both secure and stable. otherwise, this could really be an issue
I could have sworn that 10th word is stable, my bad.
Concerning security, you're partially correct. Running the HTTP stack in kernel mode doesn't make it inherently less secure. It does allow any subsequent exploit to run without any of the protections built into the OS, though (don't even try to tell me that that won't happen, either. network stack code is notoriously susceptable to buffer overflow). Want to destroy the partition table? Easy, just access the drive directly. Access kernel data structures? Sure, kernel memory is wide open. Pass bullshit to the hardware to try and get it to fail? OK, the system bus is yours. And, I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that kernel level access is all that's required to update the system bios, which could be especially nasty. Finally, causing a system crash is trivial, as the OS is no longer able to kill/deny the HTTP stack process when it trys to do something it shouldn't. But, isn't that stability and not security?!? The truth is that it, and virtually all the other things I brought up, are BOTH. A lack of stability is a security risk and vice versa, as anyone who has suffered a ping-of-death style DOS attack will gladly tell you.
Honestly, I don't hate Microsoft. As you noted, they have been extremely successful and I respect that. It just urks me that they seem entirely willing to unleash bug ridden code without much thought for what happens when said bugs are used to compromise a substantial chunk of the systems on the net. Running an application level network protocol stack in the kernel is just one of many examples of this. Another good one was their narrowly thwarted attempt to allow any user process access to raw IP sockets in XP, which would have exponentially increased the difficulty in dealing with DDOS attacks. Even a little forethough on their part on issues like this would go a long way, and it's a sham that they don't use it.
Hope I answered your question.
This is probably Microsoft's last chance...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I live (NYC area), it seems like if anything, MS technologies are getting a BIGGER grip on things. Virtually every new job out there, it seems-- and this includes jobs whose titles include the word "Unix"-- demands experience with ASP/IIS/VB/VC++ and other MS programming and server-side products... Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I am not so confident any more in the rankings posted on www.netcraft.net
My boss, who before taking the helm of the little dot-com I work for used to work with "big money" firms all the time (and was the CEO of a national chain or three at one point), refers to the work I do with Linux and Unix as "your silly little programs". Her attitude towards MS is that it's "The Industry Standard(TM)" (you can almost hear the "(TM)" at the end) and therefore that we will use it wherever it is The Standard, case closed, no questions asked. I am lucky that in her case, she has not extended this groupthink to the server room... yet. You can bet that within a few years, we will migrate away from our current servers (Solaris on UltraSPARCs) to Windows at this rate. The sort of pro-MS dronery one hears nowadays from businesspeople is nothing short of alarming.
It's depressing; I've been looking for a job as a Unix SA, and I swear I've actually seen one or two job postings for "Unix SAs" where it says "MCSE is a plus"... and I might have been hallucinating, but I think I even saw one that said "MCSE required"... In NYC, it seems like all of the big-money companies (financials, telcos, etc.) are all gung-ho about Windows, and it's hard to find a "virgin" Unix SA job... that is, one where you can't find words like "MCSE", "ASP/IIS", "VB" or "VC++" in the "Required" and/or "Preferred" lists.
Re:This is probably Microsoft's last chance...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is probably Microsoft's last chance...? (Score:3)
"FOSS" (Score:3, Insightful)
Being a small bit of a geek, I think myself qualified to say whether a term is esoteric or not, and I must say, I've never seen FOSS in my life before. My first thought was "How is my local tourist goods shop [vtourist.com] suddenly competing with Microsoft on a global scale?".
Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Thanks, that's what I want. More adjectives. And, once more, have them all thrown into an acronym I can't recognize. That's not going to encourage cliquishness or scare away people who might otherwise be interested.
I even thought to look at E2 [everything2.com] to see if the obscure FOSS had been noded. If it had been, a little link could have at least been provided to make this more accessible. Nope. Then again, I remember reading something in the Slash CVS [slashcode.com] which mentioned the E2 linking (with those little question marks) was broken [slashcode.com].
Heh. Tight budgets. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never failed to raise an eyebrow with an open source pitch simply by quoting the customer what the microsoft liscensing would require for the project, and comparing it to what I would charge for the whole deal, which is usually about the same. The only way a MS shop could compete is if they installed their crappy equipment for free.
Install it cheap, make your money off the service contract, and watch your competitors go broke trying to undercut you.
Life is sweet.
Maybe it's me... (Score:5, Funny)
Ironic....
Ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Microsoft doesn't expect many people to upgrade from Win2k. It's a damn reliable OS only released 3 years ago. Very few people will upgrade to Win2k3.
2) Major changes in a server OS are generally not a good thing. Incremental improvements are best when you're dealing with such a huge mission critical product. That's the main reason Win2k Server didn't replace NT4 machines overnight.
3) Microsoft expects many NT4 systems to be upgraded. Lots of people were weary of upgrading to Win2k Server but now they have a second generation AD and many other improvments over NT4. NT4 to Win2k3 is a big upgrade, well worth the cost.
I'd love to tell Microsoft to go pound sand, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty high up in the IT food chain in a medium-sized (300 PC users, half-billion USD annual revenue) company. We've been using Linux in several mission-critical roles for over five years, and I'd love to cut Microsoft loose altogether, but I just don't think I can do it yet. A few of the reasons:
Re:Try Hacking my windows 2003 Server (Score:3, Insightful)
$100 bucks huh? Either you are wanting people to work (hack) at slave labor prices, thus doing your dirty work on the cheap, or you only have $100 worth of faith in a product that costs alot more.
If someone just needs the $100, I could use some help this saturday spreading mulch and chainsawing several large trees here at the house.
Re:Try Hacking my windows 2003 Server (Score:3, Funny)
Not a bad thing if they improve without bloating (Score:5, Interesting)
The web server edition is also nice, cheaper than buying a full blown server just to serve web page, with full support of COM+ and Terminal server remote administration (on a funny note, win2003 server web edition has a "win 2000 skin" default... the start menu is "winXP-like" but the windows and all that I was was like win2000
Reading on their website, they make a big deal about the Group Policy editor, Didn't see it in action yet but that's one place they'd have plenty of room to maneuver; I hate active directory in current win2k server. Even with all patches applied, there's always that little thing somewhere hidden in some documentation deep somewhere that if you toggle on without being exactly sure on all the 2nd-effects of that action, you get burned. I have a hard time imagining somebody actually deploying an active-directory structure with remote offices and centralized servers with let's say 10 locations 50 servers and 5000 clients with some weird problems I've experimented recently, I can see why people are affraid of moving from NT servers and are always waiting for the second itteration of a technology before deploying it.
If activ directory is better in 2003 (which it should be) and there's less bugs, I won't mind upgrading it since I don't have a gazillion servers on site. The web edition is a nice add-on in their portfolio, again, depending on the final price it will sell for.
The only thing that would potentially make me NOT upgrade is that stupid activation crap. You're legit, you bought it, there's plenty of hacked keys or cracked version going around so if someone decides not to be legit, it's a no brainer..., if my system crashes or I have weird problems, the last thing I want is to be on the phone waiting for the right to "reactivate" my license while everybody will think "he needs tech support because he doesn't know what the problem is"
Upgrade issues. (Score:5, Interesting)
One Small Step (Score:5, Funny)
windows 2003 as a desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Why does this always turn into Windows vs. Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Win2k3 is a nice upgrade...I say this because it includes a lot of the things that people ASKED Microsoft for from Win2k.
- Resultant set of GPO available without using GPRESULT (GUI reporting MMC. cool if you've ever have the problem of tracking down GPOs)
- Rename a domain & not have to rejoin all workstaitons
- Nice new volume utilities - VSS (volume snapshots)
- IIS 6.0 - a little more secure (it's still not APACHE)
but to compare this type of OS to Linux isn't fair. You really can't EVER compare the two.
- Linux requires really learning and living Linux, and I haven't really seen any training seminars/tracks dedicated to learning LINUX (ok, now you bastard nitpicky people are going to name places where they have them, but the fact is that they're not widely available)
- Linux doesn't have a tool for a unified directory. MS doesn't have it 100% there, or even 75% for that matter, but they're trying.
- Linux as a desktop is clunky...average users won't be able to deal with it, and AVERAGE USERS make the difference when it comes to LINUX OR NOT. We can be as asmart as we want with Linux, but they have to use it to do work, and the work drives the OS.
I happen to be more than a little familiar with Linux, and it's just not there. It's fun, it's different, and I HATE the way that MS bullies users into licensing and upgrading (I have clients who run NT4.0 happily and have to upgrade b/c support for it is being cancelled in July). BUT -
before linux can be accepted as MS has been accepted, they need to stop having so many FLAVORS OF IT. Can't you band together yet??? Getit together and SLAY this goliath. Until then, stop complaining. Linux is making it more difficult ot take seriously be having so many flavors.
(and STOP before you flame that...you know that everone that loves LINUX loves their flavor of LINUX and not just LINUX.)
Anyone else care to comment? I'm interested. if you're going to flame, keep it to yourself unless you can back it up.
You don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux is there because many people believe it solves their computing problems, most importantly it solves the problem about who decides how to handle your own computer resources.
With MS you have to upgrade when they say you must, to what they say you must, under the conditions they dictate to you and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it if you have become completely reliant on MS based stuff for your crtitical computer work.
With Linux and other OS OSes
Familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
the Linux community has to concede the desktop market to Microsoft and move on
PHP-GTK is a byproduct of a "Windows-like" toolkit (GTK) meeting a definitely server-based language. (PHP)
The result is quite impressive. I can use the same codebase for file i/o and communications on the Windows clients as on the Unix server, giving me guaranteed 100% compatability.
This is a natural for Web services and network-based software!
I welcome the improvements
Re:Familiar (Score:3, Informative)
Wait. So, while Windows is getting better, Linux is becoming more like Windows, but is getting worse? No matter how hard I try, I can't reproduce the mental backflips necessary to figure that one
Fiscal Discipline (Score:4, Informative)
Lets see...
Samba as a PDC/BDC : cost of hardware
Apache as a webserver : cost of hardware
Microsoft as both : cost of hardware and obscene license fees.
Take Economics 101.
the author: this is a small part of a bigger pkg (Score:5, Informative)
To give some context, this is a short column I wrote for this week's (4/21/2003) eWEEK news package on Windows Server 2003. It's short because of print space limitations. The whole collection of related news articles in this week's issue is at http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,3960,1034194,00.a sp [eweek.com].
Next week, eWEEK is publishing an eWEEK Labs review of the product. In that package, there are six pages of copy covering Windows Server 2003 overall security changes, IIS 6.0, 64-bit Windows, Active Directory changes, file and print changes, development, and storage and SAN changes.
Thanks,
Tim Dyck
eWEEK Labs West Coast Technical Director
It's a Huge Step Forward for Admins.. (Score:4, Informative)
More under-the-hood stuff goodness in Win 2K3 (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people here are complaining that Windows 2003 has few improvements, but as a software developer, I know that is not the case. For example, take a look at the latest Platform SDK or MSDN docs, you'll find that a lot of API improvements are listed as "Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2003 Server only".
For example, Windows XP/2003 adds enhancements to the Security API, making it easier and more efficient to check a user's access rights. (I'm referring to the Authz### series of functions)
There are also a whole slew of new command line enhacements that system administrators have been asking for. It is now possible to automate almost everything in windows through the CLI. This has not been possible before. For example, new CLI mode programs include 'reg' (for editing the registry), 'netsh' (for configuring networking), 'waitfor' (for synchronizing scripts across servers), 'diskpart' (for managing disks and volumes), and a whole bunch of others. Some of these are simply upgraded versions of existing tools in the Windows 2000 Resource kit, but it's nice to see them built-in, instead of an add-on.
One thing that still irks me though is that Microsoft simply refuses to make the UI defaults reasonable. Every time I install Windows, I am forced to go through about half a dozen dialog boxes to toggle every single setting in those boxes to the exact opposite of their default values. Hiding extensions is NEVER a good thing, and it has confused everyone I have ever met. Nobody likes it, and it is one of the primary causes of the ".jpg.vbs" style viruses. Why can't Microsoft simply admit that they were wrong? Why do folders still show the Win 3.1 era large icon view, when everyone I know prefers the Detailed view? Why? Why must you hurt me Billy?
A list of all CLI commands available in Windows 2003 [microsoft.com]
An example of the new Security API functions in XP/2003 [microsoft.com]
activation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does Win2k3 have activation? If so, why would anyone downgrade from Win2k?
If it Quacks… (Score:2)
Re:IT managers on tight budgets? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:IT managers on tight budgets? (Score:2)
Sure, linux is free, but it's not quite that simple for some people...
Re:Is Microsoft using Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=msn.com [netcraft.com]
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=hotmail.com [netcraft.com]
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=microsoft.com [netcraft.com]
Re:Is Microsoft using Linux? (Score:3, Funny)
They would be it would be too expensive.
Re:Windows Server 2003 (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, ok, I'll bite:
Not true. I've heard of plenty.
What marketing gimmicks exactly? I love Windows XP. It works perfectly for me. It has quite a bit of the software I use built in. I love the interface, and if I didn't, I could go back to the Win2000 interface, which I also love. I've used UNIX and I hate it. I will say, I'm going to give Linux a try soon though.
Re:Windows Server 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Um, Windows XP was a drastic change to the OS over WinMe/98/95. At least in my opinion.
[/quote]
Actually, Windows XP was an upgrade from Windows 2000 which was an upgrade from Windows NT 4. So, in reality, Windows XP was not a drastic change as it was just upgraded from 2000 and never came from the 9x line.
Re:NT 6? (Score:3, Informative)
5.2.3790
Re:Windows Server 200x (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll probably renew my MCSE credentials in order to help out customers on migration and interoperability but without some forced reform like the Teamsters went through, I can't imagine how the public can trust MS with anything.