Apache 2.0 vs. IIS

TonyG writes: "According to an item on InternetNews, the impending release of Apache 2.0 could very well mean the demise of IIS. Interestingly, the article asserts that Microsoft have already given up on IIS, the proof being its absence in XP Home and its non-standard presence in XP Pro. Apache.Net? Sounds catchy..." That's a silly argument by the internetnews.com writer - IIS isn't in the Home edition because Microsoft wants to charge more for "server" operating systems, not because they're "admitting defeat". But it's a decent look at the upcoming Apache 2.0.

Comments

Configuration

[ViceClown]

Kudos for the apache team on 2.0 but until it's as easy to configure and add onto as IIS it will continue to be a battle with Microsoft.

Re:Configuration

[tshak]

Kudos for the apache team on 2.0 but until it's as easy to configure and add onto as IIS it will continue to be a battle with Microsoft.

It all depends. I'd say that for most situtions you are right - IIS is not only easier to set up, but it is a very fast web server (dynamic content). Apache, however, _can_ be easier to setup when you want to "script" say 500 small static sites. httpd.conf is not that difficult to learn, nor is it that hard to create a Perl or shell script to automate it. On the flipside, writing VBScript via ADSI to script IIS sites is a huge PITA (and performance hog). If MS would just move IIS's config out of the metabase and into some XML config file, then I think your statement would be correct accross the board.

Re:Configuration

[ViceClown]

Ahhh... excellent points! Being a web developer (and a geeky one at that) I am not affraid of apache or http.conf. That said, I know that some other consultants I know that work in the IT field wouldn't know where to start. LOTS of IT folks with their summer training only know gui setup screens and dont' take kindly to conf files... to say nothing of compiling new modules into apache. Im not pooping on apache here... I like it and really appreciate it's security/stability. The majority of people using it, however, who are in IT so they can "have a job" don't want to deal with config files. Now Im rambling. Anyway - I appreciate the feedback!!

Re:Configuration

[Jahf]

buy a Cobalt appliance or it's like ... or just install Webmin or something similar for free. Both of those are easier to manage than IIS for a server dishing out many different web sites.

Re:Configuration

[spideyct]

With ASP.NET (which is a sort of "extension" to IIS 5.0/5.1 for running .aspx pages), you can configure MOST of the settings for ASP.NET pages using the XML web.config file.

But since it runs within IIS, you still have to use the IIS Manager for such tasks as creating a new application directory, changing the directory security settings, or setting the default document.

Re:Configuration

[Cally]

Kudos for the apache team on 2.0 but until it's as easy to configure and add onto as IIS it will continue to be a battle with Microsoft.

Easy to configure?? Your'e kidding, right?

I first played with Apache (on NT4 in fact) at about the same time as I was given my first real live webserver to handle - which was IIS3, and soon afer, 4. Configuration of IIS is a nightmare compared to Apache. There are tons of things wher eyou have to painstakingly click up and down a complicated tree hierarchy with obscure generalist names like "web site" "host" "pubHTML" (IIRC, this was a few years ago now) and change them at multiple levels. This was especially true for getting CGI to run properly instead of sending back the source as text, or 500-ing, or whatever. Not at all intuitive. With Apache, there were IIRC a total of three things to type into a config file - plaintext, well commented, and pretty obvious what they should be. It took less an hour to get running even the first time I used it; and I wasn't at all used to editing text config files at the time.

From then on, as I used IIS to run Perl CGIs I'd mostly written & debugged at home on Apache, I grew more and more impressed with Apache. It's fast, flexible, incredibly stable (it's never ONCE crashed on me in production), secure (it was such fun tail -f ing the access log during CodeRed and nimda ...) and adding modules, of which there are tens of very powerful ones from HTTP proxies to authentication via databases, encryption, URL correction, you name it ) is usually just a matter of reading the docs for 10 mins, running configure, make, make install and adding a couple of lines to (the same) config file. Cos it's plain text I can do it in any editor I liked; when I started I was using Notepad and Programmers File Editor on Windows; now I use emacs , on Linux AND NT, but I could use Vi, or Microsoft Word, or whatever the hell else I wanted to .

Eventually I was fired for using Perl and Apache in production, instead of IIS. My successor was the guy who'd been doing the HTML and graphics for the content - a good chap and certainly capable of picking up at least as good Perl as I'd written (not very, at the time. But it worked, dammit! :) . He complained to me a few months later that after several very expensive courses, and a load of bloated expensive slow Visual InterDev / Vusal Studio guff installed on his machine, he'd started converting my Perl to ASP. IIS crashed all the time, not only on his dev machine but on the production server. He was secretly reading the Gecko on his own time and playing with a sly Apache install... :)

I wonder if any of the commenters in favour of IIS actually moved FROM apache to it. IN my experience the traffic is all one-way...

Re:Configuration

[scrytch]

There are rumors that moving the IIS document root directory is quite complicated. Do you really have to change registry entries, without support from the GUI?

Find the server in "my network places", right-click, select "manage", expand "internet information services", right-click "default website", select "home directory", change it in "local path".

Too much clicking on different widgets and popups and waiting for my tastes... I tried editing this in the registry (seems to be under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\Param eters\Virtual Roots) but it didn't seem to take when I checked the value in mmc.

Cobalt's approach is nice, they use mod_perl to read in a config file written by their configurator app and generate the appropriate config info. It's too bad the interface absolutely *sucks* for managing more than a couple dozen virtual sites on one box (we had one cobalt box serving up 200 sites. not fun, since the group-based security model starts to lock out the admin user after only 28 sites)

Re:Configuration

[archen]

I'd say those are exactly the experiences I've had. At the place I work we have a box that was set up for months with IIS for the company intranet. Luckily I wasn't there for that part, as I hear that it took weeks to get it to filally work right. Now the problem is that they can't really get it to do much else. Not long after there was a linux box installed running Appache. Both the NT and linux box are needed for other things - the web server stuff is just extra baggage.

Then the word came down to me that I was to start working on the company intranet. I had no experience with IIS or Apache so it was pretty much whatever I found to be easier. With IIS I found a cute dynamically generated template from the start. The source of the pages looked like a mess of ASP stuff that I really didn't want to deal with. Actually trying to configure the thing wasn't much easier with the obscure/non descriptive names. Updating the thing didn't work very well either as the Microsoft wizards tended to break the things that were actually working.

In contrast Apache only gives you the "you're running Apache - have a nice day" page. I'm okay with config files, and I certainly found it relatively easy to setup with the well commented files. Thus the Linux side continues to grow and become more useful every day. I'm not neccesarily against IIS (although I'd never leave a server running it directly exposed to the internet), but I think it leaves a lot to be desired when compaired to the free alternative.

Re:Configuration

[clifyt]

"I first played with Apache (on NT4 in fact) at about the same time as I was given my first real live webserver to handle - which was IIS3, and soon afer, 4. Configuration of IIS is a nightmare compared to Apache."

Well, yeah...IIS3 SUCKED. It had the worst interface ever. 4 wasn't bad. 5 actually got things right from a GUI POV. Every version only has gotten better.

Hell, if it weren't for M$'s practices of blaming sysadmin for their mistakes (and with an organization as big as M$, its to be expected...holes are actually easier to accidently be left in because so many developers have their hands in the pie) and the fact that I can serve almost 3x as much dynamic content from the equally equiped Linux box (IIS still can server more static text...but who the hell uses static text these days???) is why I moved over Apache for most of my stuff.

Right now, I use a mixture of servers and finally started converting my code to PHP and JSP from ASP (and a few other 3 letter acronyms) and finding these aren't nearly as bad as the 'professional' web developers will tell ya. Not as many visual tools to work with in the programming (ie., no PHP for Dreamweaver...ok there IS an extention, but it isn't nearly as fleshed out as the ASP and I still find it faster to do database stuff by hand).

So, if I had dedicated IIS Admin, more hardware that I didn't have to service and lots of licenses, I'd probably go with M$'s contribution...its much easier to find a monkey that can fix a M$ problem than a Linux / Apache problem. But as I know how all this stuff works and I don't have all the above, I'll probably keep converting my old boxes over to Linux as they retire from their windows duties (and get more performance they did in the previous years to boot :)

clif

Re:Configuration

[Hunsvotti]

This is one of the reasons why I rail against my company hiring consultants. If our experiences are a good metric, then I'd have to assume that most consultants are mega-'tards.

Whenever we have hired consultants, they have given us products that range from mediocre to absolute crap. They have also been generally disinterested in providing after-hours support, even though they are paid for it. (Why should they be troubled at 3AM to fix something they wrote that's costing $5,000 for every minute it's broken? They're consultants. The company can do well or fail; it's no skin off their backs.)

Then, when they're long-gone, in-house types like me get a hold of their source code, SQL schema, etc. The source code is invariably coded in a style reminiscent of GW-BASIC (which, for those of you who don't know, is one of those crusty old BASIC interpreters from the mid-to-late '80s that make you use line numbers and have GOSUBs instead of functions): ultra-rigid structure, little to zero code re-use within the application, sloppy functions (if there even ARE functions), spaghetti-like style, etc. I recently looked at some utter crap left behind by a consultant. When I asked about it, I was told that someone had gone through a business requirements document with the consultant PARAGRAPH BY PARAGRAPH and just sort of threw together a hodgepodge of crap to handle it, rather than sitting down and actually thinking about how it should be programmed.

Oh yeah. The entire source listing was written with caps lock on, as was the SQL schema. BHRLHBLHRLHBLHGLHLGHRLHB!@@#@#$

So when I hear that consultants and other jerkoffs are allergic to text editors, it does not surprise me. OUGH NO!!! I HAVE TO COMPILE THE KERNEL OR APACHE!!! I'LL NEED YOU TO SIGN OFF ON THIS $5,000 .00 CLASS IN HAWAII PLEASE!!!

Folks, if a total greenhorn (like I was a few years ago) can read a couple documents, figure out where httpd.conf lives, and tweak it (which any MORON could do, as heavily commented as it is), there is NO excuse for a so-called professional to shy away from it.

I will never - NEVER - be able to fully respect any system administrator, developer, or other technical-type IT worker who is not at least semi-proficient in some variety of UNIX (and by that I mean BSD as well as the SysV-based stuff like Linux and Solaris). It demonstrates lack of initiative and gullibility to Microsoft marketdroid drivel. In fact, if Microsoft didn't have world-class marketdroids, I probably wouldn't even be writing this paragraph. If you want to become an MCSE, more power to you, but UNIX aversion in someone who's supposed to be an IT professional strikes me the same way as a timid driver doing 15MPH up the onramp to the freeway.

Re:Configuration

[cobar]

If MS would just move IIS's config out of the metabase and into some XML config file, then I think your statement would be correct accross the board.

That's one of the features slated for IIS 6. Or at least exporting the metabase to an XML file.

Re:Configuration

[lewp]

"you figure that because someone does not want to spend a whole day figuring out how to make a change in configuration on a piece of software because it's stored in an archane manner in a completely unintuitive fashion, that they are somehow inferior or not as hardcore as you."

Sounds like the Windows registry to me.

Re:Configuration

[jrp2]

Sure - but who in their right mind would install a root capable tool and NOT restrict access by IP?

Pretty much the same crowd that would need Webmin ;)

Demise of IIS?

[damieng]

Give me a break.

It's well integrated into Windows and it's still running many many sites using ASP (the equivalent of PHP).

With ASP.Net we may even see it start to compete against more powerful web development environment such as Java Server Pages (JSP) and Apple's WebObjects.

Having worked with both...

[AltGrendel]

...I actually find IIS easier to work with. I don't like this fact at all. I'm hoping Apache 2.0 does knock IIS's sock.c off.

Re:Having worked with both...

[Fillup]

Are you kidding? Dude, it's totally just my 2 cents, but I respectfully disagree with you.

I work with both daily - well apache 1.3, i haven't used 2. And yeah, if the MS gui control actually worked all the time, and really did what it said it did -- that would be nice. And i might respect IIS.

IIS has some neat features (like the Apache 2.0 features as far as application pooling, etc.) but I have never seen a server go down so easy as an IIS server. Ours restart themselves every few days, and we don't even really get that much traffic. High KB volume per-session, not many sessions. Maybe we're just a corner case or whatever.

I find their admin utilities to be absolutely frustrating, in that I often make a change, and then open up the panel later, and it's back to the "default" setting. I'll take my httpd.conf any day.

Re:Having worked with both...

[DavidJA]

Try having the web server go down DAILY. This is an e-commerce site we're talking about here

Did anyone ever TRY to fix it? I mean you obviously know that there are MANY IIS implimentations running out there without going down daily.

Maybe it was running some dodgie ASP script (do until rs.eof; rs.loop; [without the rs.movenext]) will obviously make IIS crack the shits by putting it in an endless loop.

Anyway, point being, /. seems to be full of incompatent systems administrators; If I was running the site, it would NOT be going down every day. I would work day and night until I had a fix. Did you ever try MS support; I've used them for problems before, and they are execellent.

...and don't give me that crap about having to PAY for support, its an e-commerce site for god's sake!

Re:Having worked with both...

[nomadic]

Try having the web server go down DAILY. This is an e-commerce site we're talking about here. When I left this particular job, it would be dicey to show prospective employers that site, because on more than one occasion when it came time to see that particular site it might be 404.

How can the web server be "down" if it's still serving the 404 page?

Re:Having worked with both...

[DrSkwid]

or use micorosft telnet

end then when you get there realise that there aren't any text editors installed you can use so it's

copy con > file.txt

and hoping you don't typo!

And there you are sat at your friends house and you've got to install software just get in which you've got to convinve him to do

nope, gimme a computer I can control with a 9600baud gsm phone on a train or out skiing

that'll be that there unix stuff

oh and while you're there back your web server up without stopping the service

including the server side active X controls

oh, darn, you can't, you've got to reboot to unload them from memory so the kernel will unlock their disk image. How long does it take to come back up? 5 maybe 10 minutes, 20 even for a well used Exchange Server. oops forgot to set that service auto start, doh now it says something's changed and i need to reboot again.

lovely on a 14.4 modem in a hotel room at $5 a minute

I'm so glad I left all that behind.

Uhhhhhh

[Bedouin X]

"Microsoft's only downside exposure would be the potential demise of IIS, which has no financial impact because the Web server is bundled as part of the OS. And, here, Microsoft has seemingly acknowledged defeat: IIS is not available on the Home edition of XP and the Professional edition, by default, is installed without IIS.

Officials from Microsoft declined to comment on this article."

What a crock of crap. As an IIS Admin I will not sit here and act like IIS is perfect (it is a royal pain in the arse actually), but this is just clueless reporting(?). IIS has NEVER been installed by default in ANY version of NT or 2000 Workstation, Professional, etc. I know that it wasn't installed by default in NT4 Server as well. I honestly can't remember with 2000 Server. Such drivel like this really throws lots of salt in the article. If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't give this writer any air of legitimacy by responding either.

Re:Uhhhhhh

[TheConfusedOne]

How did this get modded "Off-Topic"? The lead post states: "Interestingly, the article asserts that Microsoft have already given up on IIS" This person is factually, and a bit colorfully refuting the charge.

The reply is factual. In fact if you look at the NT 4.0 Workstation and W2K Pro licenses you'll see that it's against the license to run a web server on them (can't exceed 10 concurrent IP connections).

Remember the giant excrement-meteorological-event when MS tried to enforce the 10 connection limit in the early beta versions of NT 5.0? (The ol' 2000 name when it was going to be delivered in 98.)

Re:Uhhhhhh

[Kidbro]

In fact if you look at the NT 4.0 Workstation and W2K Pro licenses you'll see that it's against the license to run a web server on them (can't exceed 10 concurrent IP connections).

Are you suggesting that the NT 4 IIS could handle more than 10 simultaneous requests?

Sorry, had to bite on such an obvious bait =)

MS has not given up on IIS

[Utopia]

It is incorrect to say MS has given up on IIS. XP Pro/Home are not meant to serve Web content they are meant for business or home users respectively.

The next server version of windows (Windows .Net) will come in four different versions
Windows .NET Web Server - for Web serving and hosting
Windows .NET Standard Server - for file and printer sharing etc.
Windows .NET Enterprise Server - for applications services, Web services
Windows .NET Datacenter Server
Had MS given up on IIS they would have a seperate Windows .NET Web Server

Apache AND IIS are good..

[itsnotme]

You have to admit that both IIS and Apache are both good webservers, its just that IIS gets a lot of flak for having holes in it that admins were not quick to patch, but at the same time Microsoft wasnt too quick on telling admins to patch it OR published it that broadly.. BUT IIS to some people is easier to use, so hence the easiness facto makes it attractive to a lot of people..

Apache on the other hand is also a good webserver, its been tested pretty throughly and doesnt seem to have that many holes, ( I cant say it does or doesnt because I havent looked ) but its also pretty intuitive to use for people that use Unix, so until the Unix population grows bigger than the windows population, IIS is going to be a tad more popular among that crowd..

I applaud microsoft for moving it out of the mainstream windows, it creates less of a hole to fix, and it decreases the risk of having another CodeRed type of thing happen again where users dont know that their computer is doing something.. but yeah, microsoft is tryign to make more money off it too.. this shouldnt surprise anybody

Re:Apache AND IIS are good..

[Flower]

Could you imagine having to patch a large hosting facility (I dunno...500-1000 IIS servers)? No thanks. And that's why it doesn't get done.

Doable if you are using AD. We discussed it while I attended the SANS class on securing IIS. You have one server that hosts the patches and you configure your IIS servers to periodically check that server to update themselves. The same is true of IIS settings in this circumstance. Let's say you have WebDev enabled on all of your IIS servers and you get an alert from SANS about an exploit in which there is no fix atm. You can update one template that all the servers are using and then send that out.

Would I want to admin a bunch of IIS 4.0 servers? No. But IIS 5.0 isn't as bad as people make it out to be.

Re:I must agree.

[Iamthefallen]

Interestingly, the article asserts that Microsoft have already given up on IIS, the proof being its absence in XP Home and its non-standard presence in XP Pro

It wasn't installed default in Win2k Pro either...how about nt4? Has it ever been in the default install on workstations?

It's part of .NET

[johnburton]

And although .NET is much more than web services, they are a fairly important part of the whole system and IIS is a critical part of providing those web services so I would certainly expect microsoft to continue working on IIS.

And also apache is nice in many ways, but if you just want to put up a couple files on an intranet or something, it's so easy just to right click on the directory and choose "Web Sharing" to create a virtual IIS web directory that it certainly has it's place.

Re:It's part of .NET

[dunstan]

That's exactly the problem. All the time you make people think that's all they have to do when they publish web content, you'll get stupid security breaches.

I'm not against making things simple, but some things are made dangerous in the process of simplifying them.

Dunstan

Re:It's part of .NET

[johnburton]

Well I don't really see any difference between editing an apache configuration file and using a dialog box to create a virtual directory to publish some files.

Of course in both cases you need to make sure that your web server is configured right, and has any security patches installed, and that when you publish script based pages that you make sure they are secure.

But there is nothing more secure about having a nice simple user interface to acomplish simple things than making you edit a complex configuration file apart from discouraging less experienced people from doing it all.

Re:It's part of .NET

[El_Koba]

Just wait till it's time to move your site to another machine. Or try to set up multiple web servers with the same setup to sit behind a load balancer. That's when you'll be wishing you had config files you could just copy to the new machines. I know I have.

MS gives up on IIS?

[nulleffect]

XP Home is replacement for Win9x.
There is no IIS or PWS (the watered-down version of IIS) in Win9x although you can download PWS from MS.
XP Pro, which is replacement for Win2k Pro, has IIS as optional component just like Win2k Pro.
As far as I know, there has been no change in MS' commitment to spreading the virus that is IIS. The whole .NET/owning-the-internet thing is centered on IIS and couple other things.

Whoever thinks MS is pulling out of IIS business needs to stop smoking crack.

WebDav support

[tjansen]

A missing piece in the acticle is the importance of Apache 2.0 for WebDAV. WebDAV is a HTTP-extension making the HTTP-server a real fileserver - Apache 2.0 comes with full WebDAV support. As WebDAV is quite flexible and allows stuff like meta-data, versioning and different authentication mechanisms (that are unfortunately not finalized yet) it is a possible successor for both NFS and SMB/Cifs.
WindowsXP supports the mounting of WebDAV shares, as does Linux with the help of the DAV filesystem driver. And Apache could be the standard fileserver... scary.

Re:WebDav support

[Khalid]

CVS succesor Subversion, http://subversion.tigris.org currently developed by collab.net (who is also the maintainer of CVS) is also based an Webdav. Distributed repositories will be much easier to operate.

Microsoft ditching IIS? Not likely...

[MalusCaelestis]

Microsoft will not be ditching IIS. It is not an option in Windows XP Home because the average XP Home user isn't creating database-driven Web sites in ASP or Perl/CGI (you'd be lucky to find an XP Home user that knows HTML, I'd wager). Further, IIS is not a pre-installed option in Windows 2000 Professional, so why should it be in Windows XP Professional? Most XP Professional users are not Web developers (though many Web developers are XP Professional users) that don't need IIS installed on their system.

I suppose anti-Microsoft fanatics will also say that IIS on XP Professional being limited to 10 concurrent connections is further proof that Microsoft is dropping IIS. (Windows 2000 Professional is also limited to 10 concurrent connections.) But really this is just a way for Microsoft to ensure that people buy their more expensive Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (and their forthcoming Windows.NET Server and Windows.NET Advanced Server).

Just because something isn't included in the Home version and isn't installed (by default) in the Workstation version of a product doesn't mean it is being dropped.

Anyone who argues that Microsoft is giving up their fight to be dominant in the Web server market doesn't know anything about Microsoft strategy and obviously knows nothing about their .NET campaign.

Instead of focusing on the demise of IIS

[Pinball Wizard]

as this article seemed to do(which is ludicrous, as many comments have already pointed out), why not play up the strengths of Apache?

If Apache 2.0 really works as well under Windows as it does under Unix, that is a really great thing. Apache currently supports almost as many languages as .NET promises to, and furthermore, modules are compiled into the server, rather than being compiled to an intermediate language and served up from a virtual machine like the .NET server will do.

Apache is a winner because it is secure, scalable, fast and reliable. If it is all these things under Windows thats even better. I wish the article could have played up the strengths of Apache rather than serving up the pipe dream that Microsoft is ditching IIS.

IIS isn't going anywhere

[RebornData]

MS has always been successful in the enterprise space by focusing on developers and putting together a platform that creates compelling value for business software developers. While it's true that MS is rarely best at anything, it's one of a small number of companies that provides a complete, supported server product line (OS, DB, app server, web server, message queueing, transaction coordination, etc...) and a development environment that is reasonably integrated across it. Enterprises see this as an advantage.

IIS is perceived to be "good enough" by many companies and organizations. The effort to find, learn, integrate, and get support for another slightly-better alternative just isn't worth it to them.

However, MS is taking a huge beating on the security issues, and if they loose that "good enough" image, there will be a crack for Apache to squeeze through. Don't count on it being there for long...

Compaq servers

[alen]

Maybe it's Compaq SmartStart and the unattended setup file they create, but IIS is installed by default with Windows 2000 on compaq servers. I know because me removing it is one of the first things I do when I configure a windows 2000 server.

watch out...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Microsoft is going to come out with guns blazing and firing on all cylinders with IIS6.0, I'll bet. Remember, we are talking about a company that is uber-paranoid and run by relatively intelligent people. Apache is a threat right now. It is more stable and more secure than IIS and Apache runs on a wider variety of platforms. While I'm not sure that we'll see IIS running on UNIX anytime soon, you can bet your bottom dollar that in terms of stability and security IIS6.0 will be a major improvement over all previous versions. IIS7.0 will just move further in that direction.

Of course, my only justification for making this statement is that Microsoft values its survival and is not, contrary to popular belief, run by idiots. If

a) Microsoft's survival depends on its ability to sell its products;

b) IIS is a product that it wants to sell;

c) A competitor (Apache) offers something that appears to be highly demanded by the market;

d)IIS and Apache compete with each other;

e)By building the market-demanded functionality into its product Microsoft might sell more of its product and take market share away from its competitor; then

Microsoft will build that functionality into its product.

They've done it in the past with other products and even leveraged their status as a monopoly in order to swallow market share. It's good to see the developers of Apache continuing to improve their software because if they were to stop doing so, Microsoft would soon provide something as good or better. As a company, Microsoft is ferociously competitive.

Apache vs. IIS

[Jennifer Ever]

Not to dump on Apache or anything, but-- One of the reasons why so many people use Apache is that it's free, not that it's necessarily a better product. If you're a small web host, well, a free server running atop a free OS beats the hell out of something like IIS, where you're paying for features that probably aren't going to get used all that often. Apache is a nice product, but let's face it--if MS decided to pour their resources into building a web server for *nix, they could probably produce some pretty incredible stuff. Of course, their whole business vision will probably prevent this from happening (and, for that matter, would probably end up crippling the product anyway). This isn't to say that Apache is a bad product--I have no doubt that there're plenty of hosts running it because it because it's simply the best product on the market for their needs, regardless of cost. Personally, I really prefer Apache to IIS, but I've only used either of them slightly, and never in a real administrative context. As for the article... What exactly does the author think MS is going to do? Drop out of the server market entirely? I mean, honestly, if you're going to draw a conclusion, which one seems more reasonable: that MS's vision of a net dominiated by MS/.Net is going to lead them to delve even deeper into the server market, or that because IIS isn't included with a couple of home/workstation OSs, it's being EOLed by MS? As far as I know, there's never been a full-featured version of IIS included with any home/workstation OS from MS.

Re:I must agree.

[oni]

Anyone ever notice how MS's version numbers are always synchronized? Win2000 (aka WinNT 5), IIS 5...

Welcome to the world of "me too" management. The really high-level managers are sitting around the table talking strategy. Somebody proudly says "We are developing the next version of the XYZ program" The other managers think 'oh shit!' and each in turn pipes up and says, "yes, we will update our PDQ program at the same time"

They all want to be part of the game; they want to keep putting points on the board.

The really funny part is when they return to their respective groups and brainstorm new features just so that there can be a point release.

Similar things happen in all organizations. I'll never forget being sent of a recon (spy) mission to another post in Korea to find out what humanitarian efforts were underway following a flood. In my bosses words "whatever they do, we had better do to" as opposed to the correct attitude "lets find out if they have any good ideas that we could also make use of to benefit the civilians living in our area of responsibility."

Server != production server; other reasons

[yerricde]

why ... would anyone seriously want to run Windows as a server

Because server != production server, and a fellow often has valid reasons for running server software on a workstation. Some users like to share a small number of files from their workstations and need more flexibility than AIM and MSN provide. Others develop web sites using tools that run on Windows and prefer to test their designs initially on localhost. If FreeBSD doesn't support your network card, your video card, or your sound card, what are you supposed to run on your workstation?

Still other organizations have an exclusive contract with Microsoft for operating system software or hard-bummed bosses who won't take UNIX for an answer.

Oh my God, this is just too funny!

[sheldon]

I love it!

"Microsoft has seemingly acknowledged defeat: IIS is not available on the Home edition of XP and the Professional edition, by default, is installed without IIS. "

Microsoft get's questioned as to why IIS would possibly be installed automatically, or why it would be installed on a machine whose user probably doesn't know what it is... So in an effort to offer a more secure platform they change the configuration in Windows XP. Home does not get IIS, and Pro only installs it by request.(Actually Win2k Pro only installed IIS by request as well, and WinMe didn't ship with IIS at all either, but whatever)

Now this guy claims it's because Microsoft is abandoning the market.

That has got to be the funniest thing I have read thus far this year. There are some equally stupid statements made elsewhere in the article, but it's really not worth the effort to point them out. :)

That scares me

[wirefarm]

I guess the thought of consultants 'doing IT' just so they can 'have a job' is something I cannot quite comprehend.

To me, that's like someone saying that they only 'do sex' to 'have children.'

Article laden with errors.

[Jayde Stargunner]

I'm sorry...but the person who wrote this article is very mistaken about the nature of IIS and Windows as a whole.

First off, it's not in Home because...well...it's HOME EDITION. IIS is one of the major "features" in Professional compared to Home. You didn't see them putting IIS in WinME, did you? Didn't think so.

Second, I assume by "non-standard" he means that IIS isn't installed by default in WinXP Pro? Yeah. Time to wake up to the FUD that has perpetuated about the "default install" of IIS. Windows 2000, both Professional and Server, didn't install IIS by default either. IIS has been "optional" for almost 2 years now. Unfortunately, the general /. crowd has chosen to keep saying "IIS is installed by default" over and over during that time, basically in reference to NT 4 only--which, honestly, is a painfully old OS at this point in time.

I'm not going to claim that IIS has actually gained ground in the last few years, since I honestly can't be sure given all the conflicting reports. However, all MS's claimed increases have taken place without IIS installed by default on all current, shipping OS's. The fact that this will continue to be the case should have little to no bearing on their current position.

Now, a brand-new Apache coming out? That's news. Talk about that. There's really no need to toss in anti-MS propaganda at any possible opportunity because it just looks plain silly. (Although I'll probably be modded down for saying so.)

-Jayde

IIS not end all, but either is Apache

[f00zbll]

It's great that apache 2.0 supports threading and other new features. Apache is a solid webserver, but it is far from the end all. IIS like wise is not the end all of webservers either. I don't claim to know the truth about the increase in IIS deployments, but IIS does offer useful features.

As other have stated, the article has tons of errors. Why in the world would IIS disappear if .NET is microsoft's push into enterprises services. Microsoft is trying to enter the world IBM dominates, so having IIS is an important piece of the puzzle. What part of web services does bob lui the writer not understand?

It's amazing he didn't read the whitepapers availabe on msdn site and see that HTTP protocol, webservers and SOAP are critical pieces. From my limited understanding, .NET takes the idea of ASP to the next level and integrates a new CLR into the webserver. It's obvious the previous ASP scripting engine for VB and Javascript wasn't going to meet the needs of .NET.

It's good that IIS is getting a serious upgrade to bring it closer to application server. Ever since ASP came out, it lacked a standard application server framework. When ever a website required stateful sessions with complex data management, developers would use Visual C++ and write com objects. Apache and IIS are finally getting closer to application servers, so that is good for developers. The article should have gone deeper into the new features of both servers and showed how it all fits into the new model of web services.

Re:Configuration and scripting

[n0-0p]

Hate to tell you this, but in NT/2K you can script essentially everything. It's pretty much always been that way. The problem is that NT admins rarely ever learn it because everything appears so GUI centric. The GUI interface is very approachable to the novice. In the long run, though, you can only go so far with the training wheels on and to properly administer an MS system/network you have to learn how the OS actually works. Unfortunately that's not covered by the MCSE requirements.
I spent 3 years as an NT admin and I can honestly state that I scripted any repetitious or large tasks I encountered. Of course most of the other admins I worked with, while fairly technically knowledgeable, seemed oblivious to the concept of scripting or programming in general. I'm not a fan of Microsoft (I don't like signing 12 NDA's to look at my OS's source) and NT/2K/XP do have some serious flaws. But it get's a bad rap for the wrong reason most of the time, and a lack of scripting support is not really one of it's failings.

Re:Quality Config Tools

[the eric conspiracy]

What the GNU community has to do now is create quality configuration tools for our text based config files.

My opinion is that text based configuration for servers is far superior to the Microsoft GUI approach. Here are some of reasons why:

- No need to run some sort of windowing protocol over the network, be it X or PC Anywhere or whatever. These are SLOW. Hell, on Linux/Unix servers there is no need for any sort of GUI.

- Please explain how you grep a GUI interface to find that key coniguration parameter you want to change?

- Want to experiment with a configuration change? cp the text file to a backup copy, and hack away secure in the knowledge that reversion is just another cp away!

- GUI configuration tools under Microsoft are very misleading because they do not give you access to the whole story. Example - what does it take to install another service using port 80 on a Win2K server? You have to hit the command line!

There are many others.

The ulitmate proof of my argument is that there have been a number of projects to develop GUI configuration tools for Apache. Does anyone use them? No! Why? Because text configuration if far superior.

Re:I like config files better

[purplemonkeydan]

IIS 6 (.Net Server) allows the metabase (where IIS keeps it's settings) to be stored in an XML file. You make a change to the XML file, it updates the metabase. You make a change to the metabase, it updates the XML file.

Very handy if you want to keep a standardised configuration backup.

IIS 6.0

[Vlad_Drak]

I've been working with IIS 6 (Whistler/.Net) for over a year now, and its actually come a really long way in this release.. (duck) Alot of the positives of Apache have been built in (remarkably similar..makes you wonder) like a text based config in XML, an HTTP kernel mode listener, and some really cool isolation features. For a shared web hoster its a god-send, letting you bind a virtual server to its own process (and security context), so if a customer starts hogging you just check the PID and voila you know who's the culprit. You can also ping the worker processes/virtuals for various stats and do non-intrusive restarts. Much better than the old days of having the whole server dump hard and a reboot.

Anyways, funny they didn't mention any of that in the article.. quite the clueless writer. I'll never claim IIS is as stable, secure, or flexible as Apache, knowing first hand, but its definately better than it used to be.