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Microsoft Pulls Plug for Support on NT4
seymansey writes "According to Neowin.net and News.com, Microsoft has apparently announced that as of the end of June, support for the now aging NT4 OS will be pulled. NT4 Server users have until the end of 2004 for support. Windows 98 users will be the next on the list for axed support too. Of course, Microsoft will still provide its knowledge base, but we wont see any more patches, etc. developed for the OS. After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go."
A full description of Microsoft's end-of-support, end-of-life policies, including dates for *all* it's OSes, can be found here.
--LP
...After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go.
After spending two years in MA phone support for NT on laptops I would have to say I am happy the damn thing is finally dead.
Installing NT on anything was time intensive, installing drivers had to go in a particular order or it turned that hardware into a doorstop:
imag0: "You mean to tell me you installed the video drivers before you installed card services and your ethernet drivers?"
Client, quivering after spending the past three hours reloading NT on a laptop: "Uh, yeah."
imag0: "Ok, pull out your boot diskettes again and see if we can repair install..."
A long running joke in laptop support was that NT meant "Not Today". And it was true. Repair installs didn't. Service Control Manager (SCM) was only there to throw cryptic, useless errors at users just long enough to generate support calls and let's not get into how hard Adobe Acrobat and SP4 clusterfucked in some Trident configurations.
Glad it's dead. No love lost here. Burn your cd's and feel happy its gone the way of win 3.11 and MS Bob.
If you upgrade from NT4, do it right. Use Samba.
The latest version of Samba even allows you to set up your Samba server to be a PDC, and directly migrate your users & groups from an already functioning NT Domain.
The sad thing, however, it that in the future, you will be forced to migrate, as your license will be temporarilly.
When you are wise, you stick with NT4 as long as possible (very good with Office 97 for an administrative environment) and leapfrog to the version after Server 2003 or perhaps a later version. This is definitely the cheapest option.
It's about time that temporal licences will be prohibited by the courts. IP protection for software is good, whether it's a GPL or M$ license (and in some cases even patents, but with reason and a good system, but that's a little off-topic). However, when it is used to force people to expensive investments time and time again, allthough a company does not need it (e.g. my comment above and my 500kHz AMD K6 works perfectly well for word processing), it's appalling and should be targetted for an investigation. Unfortunately, we all will know how this will end.
Good point. Here's a better lifecycle link at Microsoft, which includes it's Windows server products and a bunch of other server products. For Office and other MS products, you can try this link.
;-)
--LP, who is 'journal whoring', not karma whoring thank you very much
See this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;196661
It's summary says: Windows NT 4.0 does not support Universal Serial Bus (USB) host controllers. There are no plans to provide USB support in Windows NT 4.0 in a future service pack.
Actually, there were at least 7 service packs.
Service pack 6 wasn't very good, so they added 6a.
Just about everything that I installed in the last 2 years required 6a- and wouldn't run under 6. I believe that SP6 was one of their early disasters.
No reason to lie.
PPC, Alpha, x86, MIPS
Reminds me of company that I worked for, but instead it was for the desktop PC. But then again it was one of those companies that forced everyone to use outlook and explorer. Knowing that I had a perfectly good portable, which was of a better config, at home with Win2K I asked them if I could use it at work. They told me yes, but I wouldn't get any support or have the machine authenticated for the Windows network. So I brought it in and found myself more comfortable doing my work. I really didn't miss not being able to access the windows network, since nobody really shared anything anyhow.
One other thing to mention is that I copied over the development environment, and in any case the support team didn't even support it on their 'supported' machines.
In some companies the support guys support my intiative, but due to company policy have their hand tied when it comes to doing it themselves.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I know of what I speak since my place migrated from NT4 (desktops in fact, but the argument would apply if we were running custom apps on NT4 servers) to XP about a year ago. I was in general in favour but asked our in-house support people how many apps I would have to rewrite/recompile to work with XP and Office XP rather than NT4 and Office 2000; they did a quick test and said it seemed trivial.
Of course it wasn't and I spent a significant amount of time that I should have been using for new projects in getting the old stuff (which worked perfectly well on the old platform) to work again.
The fixes were almost all trivial (e.g. use a different API function, or a specific configuration option) but took a disproportionate amount of time to track down (in code that has worked perfectly on the old platform for 2 or 3 years), during which the users are asking "Why doesn't it work today when it was working yesterday?"
Yes, of course we should have carried out a whole validation exercise on the new platform etc. but it can be hard to justify the time and expense of that while there is always more than enough new work to be doing.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
Actually, support for NT4 server is continuing. Non-security hotfixes will be issued until January 1, 2004, and they will "pull the plug" on January 1, 2005. Take a look at this page for details.
Contrast that with Red Hat for example, who are yanking support for their 'personal' operating systems 12 months from the time of their release. It's kind of sobering to think that Red Hat 8.0, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1 are end of lifed in six months from now and 9.0 a mere four months after that.
While this might save Red Hat money in the short term I have to wonder what impact it will have on customer confidence. Even assuming you bought it on the very day of release at best you get twelve months maximum of bug fixes, which isn't very much especially if you were planning on deploying it. If some horrible exploit is discovered ten months from now you're screwed. You might appeal to the community to produce an updated patch, but you still forfeit any QA testing or automated RHN update that you would have gotten before.
Well that's why RH has introduced their Enterprise server/workstation/advanced server/whatever line of products, with all kinds of support options. They have, IIRC, a 5 year support lifetime. Granted, they cost a lot too, but RH has to make a profit just like any other company. IMHO, their strategy is entirely reasonable:
(a) Use the "normal" RH distro, get the latest and greatest software for free, and help RH and the free software community improve the software (by filing bug reports, if nothing else).
(b) Buy the Enterprise/blahblah products and get a high quality product with a long lifetime and support.
(c) If you're just a parasite expecting to get everything for free without contributing anything, sod off.
Those with the server version of NT 4.0 have a bit more time. As earlier reported, extended support for that operating system doesn't expire until the end of 2004.
Desktop June. Server End of 2004.
RTFA. RTFA stands for Read The Fuckin Article. Any other questions? If not, I'll ask you, get your coffee yet?
As for NT4, good grief. I miss it like I miss Ethernet BNC connectors. The memories bring back tears. And they're not of joy.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
RedHat's policy is that if you want 5 years of support, buy a copy of enterprise Linux, otherwise upgrade your O/S every year. Simple.
The nice part about Linux is you aren't locked into one vendor. If you don't like it, run Debian or SuSE or something else!
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Yes, in fact there's pounds of documentation on migrating NT4 to Windows Server 2003. I've got about 5lbs of it on my desk (About 1/3 of the Administrator's Companion for WS2k3 is about NT4 migrations)
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
You upgraded rather than a clean install, right? That's a prescription for problems like yours.
Also, if you have an AIW, did you get the Remote Wonder too? The drivers that ship with the Remote Wonder will force a reboot at least every 4 hours, the latest drivers fix this problem.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
... and there will be more since it is just the workstation support that is ending. Server installations still get another year and a half of support.
(remember, there was some flak a couple months ago about a patch that was available only for 2000 and XP while NT4 was left vulnerable; that's what they finally fixed)
Red Hat is a company that makes pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to Microsoft. Actually, it's more like a few molecules collecting at the bottom of a fifty-five gallon drum. Red Hat's source of revenue will inevitably shift more and more from their boxed product to OEM deals and services for their software.
Red Hat's end-of-life-cycle comes about for maintaining packages that were in the base installation of the product. However, their subscription package (primary service via RHN) allows customers to obtain newer versions of the package with the security fixes even above and beyond the end-of-life-cycle determined for that release. Red Hat will no longer be back-porting patches for expired packages. Instead, you will have to install the latest packages and dependencies. Is this necessarily bad?
You are also comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation did not include an office suite, multiple web browsers, a compiler suite, (and so on and so forth). The complexity of Red Hat's (or any other Linux vendor) distribution makes it almost necessary to dedicate software developers to the strict task of back-porting patches for new versions of software for their old, and should-be-retired counterparts.
Recent versions of up2date (Red Hat Linux 9 and Red Hat Linux 8.0 errata) feature the --upgrade-to-release option which allows you to migrate your system to the most recent version of Red Hat Linux. I have used this switch on three systems now, and they have worked flawlessly. Red Hat's method of automated package management has come along way since the Red Hat Linux 7 era to the point where it, combined with its online counterpart, is an effective means of administering an installed base of workstations.
If companies opt for the subscription model (which the Red Hat Network provides much more than security updates and patches), they get something that goes above and beyond the end-of-life-cycle for the distribution as the Red Hat Network will ensure that the distribution is kept free of vulnerabilities and crippling problems. It is not to save money. It is to generate revenue and establish confidence in a system that works - relying on your users to install security patches on their workstations is asking for trouble.
The open source world moves faster than that of the closed source world quite simply because Microsoft does not have a new version of "Paint", "Wordpad", "Calculator", et. al. every couple months (even weeks!) As such, development is not to innovate and add new features - everything is kept relatively the same. Microsoft can get away with support a piece of software for years.
Have you given a thought as to how much a standard Linux distribution has changed in the past seven years?
Now, imagine if Microsoft had fourteen releases of Windows (NT-based) during the past seven years. Each release brought about new versions of basic included software. Also imagine if Microsoft included all of their basic compiler suites, Office, Visio, FoxPro, etc. with each release. Wow - what a cost; especially if Microsoft end-of-life-cycle dropped from seven years down to three years.
When (not if) Microsoft adopts the subscription model of software support and upgrades, the end-of-life-cycle will force companies to maintain their per-seat subscription/license to keep their systems free and clear of vulnerabilities and stability issues.
Ayup
Since no user-program can grab ctrl-alt-del keystrokes (yay x86), forcing the user to hit c-a-d before they login proves that the login dialog is actually the system login dialog, and not some trojan somebody wrote to collect usernames and passwords.
Windows XP resets without warning because that's the default behavior on the blue screen of death. To make it show the BSOD and possibly track down the problem
Start > Control Panel > System
Advanced Tab
Startup and Reovery settings
Uncheck "Automatically restart" under System Failure
...and that's all there is to it.
We did that during the Win2k era. I inherited a sprawling suburb of fiefdoms on NT domains. I set everybody up under the same roof, and migrated them to a single linux PDC, with a dedicated file server. This was back when the PDC software for Samba was still a bit rough around the edges. It was risky, but here I am in 2003, and it's still working.
Since then the Samba system has moved through 3 versions of RedHat, a reformat to Gentoo, and swapped physical cases a few times. But the data (and all of the accounts) live on. The users blissfully CTL-ALT-DEL, and log in.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
All in all I think 7+ years of support is pretty good for something you can buy retail for 200$ (talking about XP Pro here). The "corresponding" product from Red Hat seems to be Enterprise Linux Workstation Basic at 180$, but it includes only one year of Enterprise Network (similar to Windows Update, which is free for all 7 years; Enterprise Network is 96$/year). Of course the Red Hat product may be better in 10000 other ways so this may not be a very useful comparison...
:)).
I couldn't find a product life-cycle policy on Red Hat's site so I can't tell how long they promise to provide patches. The most recent version that isn't supported anymore is 7.0 (released in october 2000) but I guess it's not fair to conclude that they support their products for only 3 years since they weren't even *pretending* that it was sellable to the enterprise back then (ok, I guess they were pretending, but not seriously
While I generally think MS got Win2K right (though not XP), several people in my office still explicitly request NT4 on new machines.
Do you work in an S&M shop or something?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Extended hotfix support (and No-charge assisted support ) for this product will end on 30-Jun-2003. After 16-Jan-2004, this product will be obsolete and assisted support will no longer be available from Microsoft. Online self-help support will continue to be available until at least 30-Jun-2006.
Roman
Why upgrade a server if it still works? Put 2000 and XP on the workstations, sure, but why replace an already-functional server? As long as it keeps serving files, right?
It'll only keep serving files for a few weeks until the next worm comes along and exploits an unpatched hole in the system. Then what? You upgrade.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
see here.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
The Navy will not be moving off the NT platform for another 5 years. All the deployed ships are using NT and they have been using NT and the plan is already set that NT WILL NOT be leaving the ships anytime soon. The earliest we will see NT leaving is 2008.
He probably isnt actually. It sounds like they develop kernel code. As a NT kernel developer(and Vx D developer... if anyone wants one developed these days :) ) I can give you a dozen ways to reboot a perfectly good box from ring zero. :)
Actually, if you want the group collaboration features you don't necessarily need Microsoft products. There are quite a few alternatives to using Windows/Exchange. This webpage has a lot of resources: Sharing MS Outlook
This looks like one of the best options: 4team for Outlook
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I agree with other comments that Active Directory is overkill for small offices. Most of the companies I work with as a consultant *DO NOT* have a full time sysadmin. With 12-30 people working for the company, it's a hard cost to justify.
That said, I also can't condone the use of NT4 over the long term, due to the unstable platform it represents. The fact that machines on SP6 still needed their monthly reboot is proof of just how awful the fundementals were.
For this class of business, Microsoft is really pushing people twards exploring options like Samba. Here in Tucson, AZ I was consulting for a firm of 160 people, with 60 terminals (at lot of the employees were shop floor workers). This is considered a fairly *large* small business, and yet at that size, Active Directory makes little sense. Lots of extra complexity, not much I gained that I couldn't do before with perl scripts and run-as functionality.
They were recently pretty much forced into 2K for stability reasons, and the end of life concerns. If it wasn't for the fact that they have a Windows based DB running on one of the servers, I would have suggested a Samba based PDC. Except for that one application, everything else is file and print sharing. For smaller organizations *without* such lockdown issues, I have installed Samba PDCs, and with not so much as a hickup.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Patches are just the most visible aspect of "support." Under the surface, if you choose to look that far, you will see that there are many other ways that a company "supports" a product.
I would guess that 18 months from now (when NT4 Server support lapses) the following things will happen:
Granted, Microsoft has certainly already scaled down support for these items in NT4 over the past few years, but the WinSE (sustained engineering) team does more work than you might expect to keep backwards compatibility for NT4 running.