Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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
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.
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!