Cygwin in a Production Environment?

not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm working for a company that does all of its programming and script development in a Unix environment (90% of our work is either Bash or Perl scripts that communicate with an Oracle database). We've recently gotten a new customer and for reasons beyond our control, the server must be a Windows box. Since we want to reuse our existing scripts that we've spent a considerable amount of time developing, we're looking into Cygwin as an option. Has anyone run Cygwin in a production server environment for any extended period of time? If so, what were your experiences with it?"

Comments

cygwin terminal

[timothv]

If you use cygwin, make sure to get a better terminal for it. Puttycyg uses Putty's great terminal emulator for cygwin, and it works rather well.

non cygwin way..

[gl4ss]

http://home.wanadoo.nl/fvu/Projects/Bash/Web/bash. htm bash & windows faq/howto thingy and perl on windows google search .

VMWare? Either Way?

[4of12]

What about the possibility of either running Linux inside VMWare on a Windows machine or the reverse?

Admission: I don't have recent direct experience with VMWare myself; it used to be that the two systems needed different IP addresses, but I don't know if that would keep within the constraints your customer wants to impose.

[My two cents: the constraint sounds overly artificial. A network-presence appliance that's secure and does its job is good enough for most people. Think of network printers, for example. It's not like every single active IP presence is going to need a Windows XP update...

Finally, I've heard some people express a preference for MinGW over Cygwin for some reason...

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Atzanteol]

Speaking of which, I would love to know WHY the client has to have Windows. Maybe there is something there that you can deal with that you don't realize.

I'm not the original questioner, but may be able to give one plausible reason. Many slashdotters seem to have trouble grappling with this idea (Why can't your client just run Linux?). Typically a given client has existing infrastructure and admins. If they have lotsa Windows guys, they'll want a Windows box so they can admin it when you're done.

I work aa a consultant, and many clients will request an operating system that matches their existing systems. Unless you can really convince them otherwise, they'll look elsewhere if you don't come up with a solution on their platform.

win4lin, co-linux?

[cwg_at_opc]

i have a similar issue: i have some semi-RT apps that were written by a vendor for
WinNT(and XP) - and not having tried either(i'm an end-user, not an admin, so i can't tinker... ;-),
there ought to be a good way to utilise one or the other to achieve acceptable results in a
production environment.

before anyone gets all huffy about XP, it is fairly stable, can be configured to be relatively
secure(!) and, a recent LinuxFormat Magazine had a co-linux/Gentoo dist on it.

anyone try either one out? philosophically, i'd prefer to use win4lin, but realise that it may be
more practical to try co-linux because of the peculiarities of XP(wierd system calls, etc.)

Re:24x7

[duffbeer703]

Sorry for being off-topic, but yours is probably the best Slashdot post I've read in 2-3 years.

Thanks.