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Windows Server 2003 Is A Small Step Forward
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."
used to be, people explained less common acroynms or linked to definitions. I miss that
Did anyone else find it really interesting that IIS now has text based configuration files. I only have passing expierence using IIS but one of the biggest headaches I have heard from people who use it alot is the fact that IIS is a real pain to configure among multiple machines.
Anyone here run IIS and used these new text based conf files and can comment on them?
It seems that Microsoft is learning a bit from their mistakes with Windows 2000 by not enabling everything under the moon by default or leaving the default settings to be so open and ripe for exploiting. That and additional support for NUMA, better clustering supports (or so Microsoft says) and supposedly new features in Active Directory to make life a little easier (again, something Microsoft is touting).
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.
They took Windows 98 SE, dressed it up a bit, and called it Windows ME.
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.
"This is probably Microsoft's last chance to turn the tide and take mindset and market share from FOSS."
... Sure, 2/3 of the Web sites out there are running on Apache, but are they the bottom 2/3 of the Web? Increasingly, it's looking like the companies Where The Money Is are requesting more and more MS stuff. And that scares me.
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.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I guess they were bound to do that, with the tech sector in the toilet, but really. Microsoft? Easy on the pockets?
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You've posted a couple obscure servers with Microsoft.com hostnames - I fail to see what that proves? The big sites are all still run on Windows (including IIS6/Win2003 on Microsoft.com).
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=msn.com
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=hotmail.com
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=microsoft.com
It really shocks me how the stupid people come out of the wood work when slashdot posts a story about Microsoft. Let me clear a few things up:
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.
Hey, they only have $5.6 B in cash. The other $37.9 B is in "short term investments," according to Yahoo. :-)
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 something of a suck it and see toss it over the fence attitude. Why spend my time testing, the user bozos can do that!
So before you nail stability and security to the mast as the colors of the good ship OSS ask yourselves if you really want to win the game on those terms. I remember asking the same thing of Netscape when they decided to take Microsoft on by inventing new features faster than Redmond...
The interesting thing about Windows 2003 is the support for .NET. If you are running Web Services then you want Windows 2003. If you are not then well, any feature you are likely to need is likely to have been supported long ago. The PKI support is much improved.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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:
- There's still no match for the Exchange/Outlook combination for integrated email, directory, shared folders and calendaring.
- A lot of needed third-party software is still Windows-only (think UPS WorldShip, ADP, etc.).
- A lot of web sites, including several we must use because of business relationships, are IE-only.
- Many of our users live and die by Excel, which means macros, which means VBA.
- Word
.doc format is still lingua franca for business, and the FOSS alternatives aren't quite there yet.
I'm sure no fan of Microsoft's licensing terms and general business practices, but I sure don't see them as being on their last legs. As much as I hate "Embrace, Extend and Eliminate", I have to admit it works, and my job is to keep the business running, not to fight political battles.The new terminal service client is nice, 24 bits support, full encryption, Group Policy applicable to Terminal Service Clients loging to the server... nice little addons.
:) Guess I am not the only one who hates XP's bloated interface.
:). of course ghosting the machine helps, but if you want to upgrade your raid and add more ram, and you change network card to a gigabit for example, blam? no thanks; as much as I like the NT environment more than Unix, there's a limit to be masochist :) Hope microsoft won't be stupid on this one (well web server edition at least).
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"
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I took a 2 day hands on class on 2003 server. Microsoft was demonstrating all the new features 2003 comes with and one of them was that you could rename the domain or forest on the fly. but it would break a few active directory applications such as SQL 2000 and exchange 2000 when the class presenter came out from left field and nearly floored everyone when he said "since were on the exchange subject be aware that you can not run exchange 2000 on windows 2003 server". You would need a mix server environment which will then not allow some of the new features work, or wait for exchange titanium to be release at the end of the year.
Since 10.2? Gee, the only thing I remember paying for is 10.2. 9.1 and 10.0 came with the computer; 10.1 I got free as a retailer with a mac up-to-date coupon; 10.2 I paid for, and apparently I'm going to pay for 10.3, but 10.2.1, 10.2.2, 10.2.3, 10.2.4, and what I'm running right now, 10.2.5, were all free. But I also paid for Windows 5.1 on an upgrade from 5.0 (Windows XP from Windows 2000), and from Windows 4.0 to 4.1 (Windows 95, 98), 4.1.1 (98 SE, $20 or so), and 4.2 (ME). (May have some of those numbers wrong, but you get the picture.)
Better yet, compare 95A with 95C. Even B had Fat 32, only 2gig partitions in A, Internet Explorer, major TCP/IP upgrade, and a whole lot more. I still love 95a's speed on a 2gig partition. scandisk in less than a minute of a full scsi 2gb fat16 drive, and none of the media fluff to slow you down. Its still my favorite version of windows, and I admin about a dozen boxes that are still running it, including a file server. Uptime in the months range. Now, image that simple but logical interface on a good Linux kernel....... (I have)
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You forgot all the additions to file server management like Volume Shadow Copy Service.
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.
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.
I forgot to answer your other question:
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!
And all those incremential Linux distos are, naturally, huge steps forward--but the minute MS refines one of its products for release and calls it a new version, it's the work of the Devil.
only open port is 80 IIS6
Prize Money : $100 US winning entry - must replace the homepage with your contact so taht prize money can be paid.
Ricky
I know MS clustering is supposed to work but after many lost message stores and corrupt mailboxes, $15k dollars for third party recovery software and troubleshooting (the MS recovery tools require a seperate unused server to restore the tapes to and required a MS quoted "unknown" amount of time for the recovery process), and over six hours hours of premium support phones calls to MS Support, THEY suggested that we move our Exchange servers over to 1 run/1 standby failover mode instead of using both at the same time with heartbeat failover.
So much for the ROI from Groupwise.
I am sure it could be configured either way and work fine but not without someone very experienced in this exact setup and to baby sit. Not really the person a 200 person or less organization can afford to pay full time. Oddly enough, that is exactly where MS is marketing these systems. There is no substitute for a highly knowledgeable administrator.
An MS Engineers point of view:
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.
The performance metric reported by TPC-C is a "business throughput" measuring the number of orders processed per minute. Multiple transactions are used to simulate the business activity of processing an order, and each transaction is subject to a response time constraint. The performance metric for this benchmark is expressed in transactions-per-minute-C (tpmC). To be compliant with the TPC-C standard, all references to tpmC results must include the tpmC rate, the associated price-per-tpmC, and the availability date of the priced configuration.
I could be wrong, but I believe the durability refers to the database, not transactions in the queue. A transaction that is queued but is never sent doesn't count. Again I could be wrong, I don't claim to be an expert.
Whereas the Fujitsu solution cost $10.8 million, twice as much
That price is from 2001. I don't know what the current price is, but it should be cheaper right. Both posts fail to mention the network for the NEC test was 2gigabit ethernet, whereas the fujitsu and IBM used 100mbit ethernet. You think that makes a difference? Again, here is the excerpt from the disclosure for NEC.
Queuing Mechanism The queuing mechanism used to defer the execution of the Delivery transaction must be disclosed.
The client application processes submitted delivery transactions to named pipe delivery server software running on the client machines. There was a single delivery server with multiple execution threads running on each client machine. These delivery servers were responsible for processing deliveries queued to the named pipe and submitting them to the database server. The source code is listed in Appendix A.
I could be reading this wrong, but it seems to imply SQL Server only ran the transaction. It doesn't manage the Queue. COM+ manages the queues on each client. Here is the disclosure from #3 IBM for how scheduling was done. I can't find the section for fujitsu.
The Delivery transaction was submitted using an RPC call to an IBM Websphere Application Server Enterpri se EditionVersion 3.0, Encina interface transaction manager (TM) . Websphere returns an immediate response to the calling program and schedules the work to be performed.
Unless I'm reading this wrong. In IBM's setup, the management of the scheduling is performed by the server with Websphere. Both posts seem to have missed some important details. Is there a difference? Read the disclosure and decide for yourself. They are definitely not equal architecturally.
There is a market that Microsoft is having absolutely no luck at all breaking into. It is geeks who want control of their own systems. In the big scheme, that market is tiny. However, the problem is that the products that serve that market can be reproduced almost for free for everyone else. That's the secret behind open source. It isn't free. The people writing it are doing a lot of work. But copying is free, and to encourage project participation, the licenses permit it. Even if MS manages to squeeze open source out of the rest of the world, it will continue on its own. If GNU, Linux, *BSD, Apache, Perl, MySQL and all the rest withered and died, the idea could be reborn in new software. And because the existing code is out there, not everything has to be built from scratch. The mascot of the OS movement should not be the Linux penguin, FSF Gnu, or BSD Daemon. It should be a hydra. Cut off a head, and three more grow back!
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.
Name a Microsoft product that this ever happened to.
Um, I hate to break it to you, but most do. Now I realize what you are trying to say is that most don't understand the OS is actually seperate from the computer, but still, most new computers do come with Windows, so I think what you said is kind of true, no?
This is true. :-)
Um, Windows XP was a drastic change to the OS over WinMe/98/95. At least in my opinion.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I did (replace windows as my primary)...about the time mandrake 9.0 was release...windows crashed, and took everything with it...I spent weeks trying to recover the data (thank god for cvs or the baseline would have been screwed too). I had mandrake 8 on another machine, so I thought I'd give it a go on my primary, go 100% linux. At the beginning, I thought I'd have to re-install windows, I just didn't see how it would be possible to not have one windows machine around, but I have to tell you, I haven't looked back since...I'm more productive and a hell of a lot more stable. I don't stress nearly as much as I used to about the state of my systems and the change over was really quite painless. I'm now slowly converting the company I work for to the same way of thinking.
Whatever, WinCE is going to have to get into a lot of "PDAs, smartphones, consumer electronics devices and other information appliances" if it's to achieve the kind of growth eTForecasts is predicting. There's certainly no sign that the PDA market will grow that fast, and we suspect the consumer electronics world will favour low-cost Linux.
Sorry to rain on your parade but seems to me that the Register doesn't believe these current predictions.
But then, 67.43% of all statistics and predictions are pulled out of someone's bung hole anyway. We should revisit this prediction in, say, 10 years.
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
An example of the new Security API functions in XP/2003
My personal opinion is that, in the early days of Windows, there was a vibrant shareware community. I always used to supplement my Windows desktop with this or that little highly useful bit of shareware. In the last few years, it has become "all Microsoft." While I was there, I would naturally run W2K Advanced Server, SQL Enterprise, VS Enterprise, and Office Pro and my desktop, because the licenses were free to me! (Probably $20,000 worth of software on all my PCs). I was always depressed that my desktop was "Microsoft-pure," and wondered what it is about such a system of events that this is so.
If I bear a personal grudge, it is rooted in wonderment as to why such a situation came to pass, and why the vibrant shareware community experience is now to be found in open source. I dunno. If I seem "mad at Micrsoft," that is a human failing of mine, I apologize, but it is rooted in a real experience I lived.
I'm on win2k3 now, build 3790.svr03_rtm.030324-2048.
.NET. The rest of the Microsoft "backoffice" however leaves much to be desired. ADS is a nightmare. It is an okay directory service for exchange, but for authentication and permission domains cross platform? Whatever. Windows NT has fundamental flaws. UNIX has been "dying" for decades, and when Windows NT failed to seal its "fate," in less than 5 years, they should have given up.
;p
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.
only open port is 80 IIS6
Prize Money : $100 US winning entry - must replace the homepage with your contact so taht prize money can be paid.
Ricky
Neither the article nor any comments mention Activation.
Does Win2k3 have activation? If so, why would anyone downgrade from Win2k?
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.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
That DRM you're so in love with has been cracked wide open, y'know.
Now go away, and tell your bosses to stop trying to combine session keys with MACs. You don't get something for nothing.
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.
:) Tell me, how would it be possible to execute say 4 threads simultaneously on a processor (without HT) ? SQLServer and Exchange are modelled on the 'thread-scheduling' model, pure and simple. SQLServer's kernel (yes it has a kernel too) even uses NT-fibers, a part of the OS which can boost threads (and other threads are suffering on this). If Win2k3 has better thread-scheduling and less process-scheduling, SQLServer and Exchange will benefit from this, but also ALL threaded applications will benefit from this (can you say: IIS? aspnet_wp.exe ?)
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 you want to use something, you read the specs and see if what you want to use can perform what you want it to perform so the usage is succesful. If you want to use an NT kernel as a monolithic UNIX kernel, and try to schedule processes instead of threads, it won't work efficiently. NT-based OS-es do not use shared memory for their processes. That's why they use threads, because these can use shared memory. When you want to use processes on an NT-kernel and you see that the performance is poor, it's not the fault of the kernel, it's the fault of the programmer who sux big time and doesn't know a thing about what he/she is doing.
Also your remark about 'VMS-like Heavyweight processes' is of the same quality: an NT-kernel based OS works differently than UNIX. You also do not eat soup with a fork, do you? even when the fork performs brilliantly when eating potatoes!
One thread per processor is the optimum? Whoa
Windows server performance is top notch, the kernels are tuned excellently, and with each server release they get better and better. I also found your resources-remark rather amusing. You are refering to the handle-count in each process. So you think it is a good thing, a process will open (2^32)-1 objects and thus has that much handles open? I think that's a bad thing. An open handle means you have an open resource, and are keeping it open. Not a lot of resources qualify for that, most resources get opened, used and are closed right after they are used. That's good programming practise.
I'm very happy for you that you think your monolithic, hardware-specific kernel is the way of the future. I also hope that you WON'T understand that how a kernel works internally is not that important, it's how the OS it is part of runs the software YOU want to run and use. If you WILL understand this, you will regret your swap. Until then, enjoy the ride, while it lasts.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.