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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."
...where I work. 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?
:-/
Now there will be companies like ours scrambling to get 2000 Server or 2K3 server on their servers by the end of next year. And we won't have a choice. Upgrade or lose support. What do you do? You upgrade.
My journal has hot
I think it should have gone a LONG time ago, NT4 was tricky as a desktop OS because DirectX was pretty much nonexistant. I think once Win2K (and the first two or three SPs)came about, NT was a goner. The sad thing really is what came to replace NT and the like for the future-> XP, longthorn, etc.
NT (4.0) wasn't that revolutionary, anyhow. kernel is about on par with 3.5, and the OS itself didn't become really stable until SP5 or so (SP4 caused crap (read: exchange) to crap out, IIRC), and by that time 2K was just right around the corner.
I will be sad when 2K goes. in my opinion that's so far the best OS microsoft made. (XP drops low on the list b/c the nasty theme and horrible amounts of crap-service that comes pre-enabled, which (especially sys-restore) slowed your computer to a crawl and more).
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Well, they acutally do provide lifetime support for their products. The only problem is that they define when the lifetime of the product is over.
As a desktop OS for l33t g4m3r kiddies maybe :) However, I think you'll find a lot of NT4 workstation installs in business and academia (my area). You don't need directx to run excel or draw graphs. Upgrading from NT4 to XP is a big unnecessary cost for organisations and a big compatability problem in the interim; incompatability of roving profiles etc.
I'm not convinced this is a good thing. While I generally think MS got Win2K right (though not XP), several people in my office still explicitly request NT4 on new machines. One guy who works on my team is considering this now, after spending a week chasing a bug somewhere on his WinXP box that causes it to reset without warning when running some essential software. Sometimes, better the devil you know really is good advice.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And then your bosses financial department screams at you the next time he can't read their convoluted, thoroughly programmed-to-death excel files. Most People who find staroffice a useful alternative aren't using ms-office so much as halfway to the limits of its functionality. I found this out the hard way: accountants are not Most People. Neither are auditors, and in some cases, even the people in the human resources department. They know crafty Excel techniques which simply don't translate into Freebie Office documents of any flavor, for good or bad.
Desktop evangelism can be dangerous, as it tricks the typical geek into thinking that because Staroffice is good enough a replacement to him for word and Excel (particularly the latter), that it's good enough for everybody. In a perfect world, maybe, but not in a real office with a lot of legacy programming, legacy programmers, legacy users, and genuinely talented Excel weenies. Much less Access weenies.
Same debate? Gimp versus Photoshop. I've had people 'explain' to me why the gimp is a perfectly suitable replacement to Photoshop. For making web graphics, sure. For doing advanced production work for high level print processing? Not only is Gimp not even in the same league, it's not even playing the same game.
Half of the corporate honchos I've had to deal with in regards to desktop issues get irritated that their office PC doesn't have the same annoying shovelware, quirky desktop setup, and bells & whistle proprietary add-ins as their ridiculous and expensive name brand PCs. Visions of apoplexy dance in my head at the idea of explaining to them why the "My Computer" icon is called something else, why it behaves differently when opened, and why the hell I can't load their three-versions-old copy of AOL onto a sweet chromed linuxy desktop, or if I can (via an emulator) why it runs slower, and why there's extra "stuff to click".
These are the same people I had to have meetings with about why the naked dancing chick.exe attachment their cousin sent them doesn't seem to work at the office (all attachments stored at server, released by me as appropriate - e.g. no exes,
I'll pass on evangelizing a more complicated (or even just 'different') user experience to these people, thank you very much.
And (drum roll...) the next two Dell file servers we are getting in for pure storage will be "tested" with FreeBSD running Samba. Took me three years - but they are going to let me try it and see if it "works out" for us. The thing that finnaly pushed this over was when me and the big boss was going over the pricing for the servers - I said "remember we have still $1600 worth of M$ that we need to buy" and he said "Oh shit thats right" - and BOOM I went into action and low and behold we are going to try it out and see what happens...
I even went out and bought Using Samba - just in case ;)
Regards,
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Because using linux as a pdc avoids a lot of licensing expenses, and works quite well?
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.
But let's face it, only a small fraction of people would be aware of or bother to manually plug new exploits anyway. With time a burgeoning number of exploitable RH boxes will become a prime target for crackers. Too bad for them you say, but often those cracked boxes are used to launch attacks and are therefore a danger to everyone. Look at Microsoft's reputation concerning security of their operating systems and wonder if Red Hat's end of life policy will mean the same for them.
This "Linux for everything" bigotry is just silly
... "Microsoft for everything" isn't? Interesting.
So "Linux for everything" is "bigotry"... but...
It is better than an NT 4 domain for so many reasons. However almost equally important is the fact that Windows Server is the Microsoft solution.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
> Samba can't act as an Active Dreictory domain controller
Neither can NT4, which is what you're replacing....
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Look, I have to ride herd on a pile of MS servers, just now more 2k than NT. We've built a damn good business using the these machines. We've stretched the things to their limits of the with some of the processes that we have implemented. We've discovered deep bugs and pushed MS to fix 'em. We have a functioning, stable business that relies on this OS.
.NET and now not .NET.
This is where MS *always* makes it greatest mistake. They desire to become respected in the Enterprise market, yet these idiots cannot put a leash on their marketing department.
Hint to Microsoft: If you want to be taken seriously, stop changing your OS's willy-nilly. IBM supports OS's and hardware for years after they've gone past their prime. Why? Because their customers still use them. Businesses are built using your software as a tool to get work done. Now just because you decide that hammers are out of vogue, you cannot force everybody to switch over to pneumatic nail-guns. This "ok, ok, ok, we're serious now. We've come up with a great new way to do X" shit has got to stop. DDE, OLE, OCX, ActiveX, COM, DCOM, COM+.
You know, it is possible to run a network with their tools (quiet down, I work for people who have made this decision and pay me to implement it), but for cryin' out loud, business processes change slowly if at all and once that you realize that marketing won't sway established systems to change at the drop of a hat, the sooner that you will find customers that will stick with you for the long haul.
That is until you get greedy and start gouging on licenses...
Chris
So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."
I was an MCSE for NT 3.51 at Charles Schwab in the mid-nineties. NT 4 was noticeably buggier and crashprone than NT 3.5*. So anyone involved with the NT servers was constantly fighting fires. I remember being struck by how calm the Unix admins were, and how they got to do more interesting work...platform uptime was a non-issue for them. So, with a little help from a sympathetic Unix sysadmin (thanks Art!) I was able to talk the boss into letting me switch to the Unix admin group. NT4......may it soon pass to the ash heap of history.
"Linux has a stable tree and an unstable tree. Developers work on the stable tree to fix bugs and on the unstable tree to put in new features. I think this is a great system. I wish Microsoft learns from it."
Um... NT and 9x?