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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.
"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
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'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.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.
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!
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
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.
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.