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 is Jus' Fine

[Giant Ape Skeleton]

My employer has been using Cygwin in production for quite some time now - we use it to get our Windows servers to act a little more...serverish :-)

I would recommend you use ActiveState's Perl distribution in conjuction with the Cygwin enbvironment.
It's reasonably prioed and well supported, without a lot of stuff you *don't* need thrown in.

CYGWIN running on production servers...

[IamInsane]

I work for a relatively large Credit Union and we currently run CYGWIN on many of our production servers to communicate with our UNISYS host. It's running in a 24x7 environment and has given us no problems. We do restart the web hosting services once a night (mostly to change log files).

We use it to interface with both Oracle and MSSQL databases. Again we have found little to no problems at all running on production hosts.

UNXUtils and ActivePerl

[Youssef Adnan]

Well.. If most of what you have is shell and perl scripts, you can always get

• UNXUtils http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ and
• ActivePerl http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/.

They always did the trick for me...

cygwin - sfu - mks

[witte]

I had a similar problem with a customer needing code ported from unix to windows 2000, with some unix specific stuff in the code like forking processes etc. (This was about two years ago)
I looked around for several solutions and came across cygwin, which did the job.

The problem was that at that time it was property of Red Hat [http://www.redhat.de/software/cygwin/support/], who apparently were busy with anything but cygwin. Their website said something about $100.000 or something for a developer license, which was out of the question. Emails I sent were not answered, and i had to abandon the idea.

Similar story with Microsoft. The *one* guy i managed to get hold of wasn't even aware they had a product named Services For Unix. (Hello ?)

Different story with MKS. Unfortunately their toolkit was over-budget too, but at least they were trying to help me, and trying to sell me a product I needed, and very polite and helpful.
(Kudos to miss K. :)

I hope for their sake they got their act together at Red hat about cygwin now, cause they probably missed an opportunity to make some bucks and more importantly get a foothold in a big japanese electronics company's development division.

Re:GPL Warning

[Haeleth]

The Cygwin.dll library that does all of the translation from Unix to Windows system calls is under the GPL. NOT the LGPL. This means that if you write an application and build it against the Cygwin libraries and plan to distribute it, the only license you can legally put your software under is the GPL. This is the only case of the "virulent" nature of the GPL that we've witnessed firsthand and I must say it is a particularly nasty one.

This is NOT TRUE.

"In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a without libcygwin.a itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.

"This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of libcygwin.a linked into it. Note that this does not apply to the cygwin DLL itself. If you distribute a (possibly modified) version of the DLL you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, i.e. you must provide sources for the cygwin DLL."

(Source: http://cygwin.com/licensing.html)

Re:What are you doing with it?

[salimma]

For example, IIRC, the fork() call on Windows is VERY slow for some reason that I don't remember.

AFAIR Linux (and probably other Unices?) is unique in this regard - fork() on Linux is similar to threads in Windows when it comes to overheads. But I read this 3 years ago so I might have misremembered it.