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Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003
mithridate writes "Microsoft has posted the Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate. eWeek has a short review of the service pack. My favorite quote from the article is, 'The company argues that the improvements are important enough that applications should be changed to accommodate them.' I know I still have not installed SP2 because of the problems it causes with SQL Server, I can't wait to see what kind of havoc it causes on the servers..."
Love Windows 2000 and don't want to bother with XP? You can always run Windows Server 2003 as a workstation with this guide.
Is it just me or are others pissed off that M$ has taken the term "Service Pack" and stretched it way beyond it's intended meaning?
A Service Pack should fix bugs, provide MINOR enhancements, and performance tweaks. Anything more is a version change.
Hell, I would be perfectly happy to see the term "Service Pack" disapear entirely to be replaced by 0.01 releases and 0.1 for bigger changes, like most of the rest of the world does. At least that terminology has meaning to me.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Interesting comment by the author about SP2. It made me think about my upgrade practices. On my Win2k servers I wait nearly 6 months before I upgrade or apply any patches. I just need to know all the bugs are out before I put it into production.
However on my linux server I love installing the latest stable builds. Maybe that is because the software tends to be of better quality?... Possibly masochism... maybe... Then again I do run Win2k server.
What could possibly go wrong?
Now with our server, I still haven't seen a blue screen almost two years now. Of course they are all Dell servers. And not like my homebuilt workstations.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Don't you realize this is Slashdot.
He had to make an idiotic comment like that to get his story in.
Anyways SQL Server runs fine on XP.
...why not just install Linux?
Parent has a point. I personally wouldn't apply a beta patch like this - sorry, "release candidate" - until it's clear that it'll result in a safer, more reliable, and above all secure system.
(Posting AC so that I don't fall out of favour.)
If programs are written properly and use all the calls and procedures they're meant to then they should work with XPSP2. SP2 did not break anything, it merely patched holes that shouldn't have been there and put an extra layer between the average user and the bits they can take out their PC with. If you use an app which utilises security holes to function, it's your lookout.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I am of the mindset that I don't touch anything Windows until Service Pack 1. At least on the server side, it's very possible. For our domain controllers at a large university on 77 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, I specifically am holding off upgrading the domain to Win2k3 until SP1. I am sure many others out there are doing the same.
As for Win2k3 in general, I think it's the best Windows yet, which is still not saying much. I won't touch IIS ever, in fact we have Win2k3 systems running apache because of vendor mandates. It's stable running, but it is Windows, so I only use them to support Windows clients.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
I'm sorry, but all of the posts mentioning catch-22 or "damned if you do, ..." are full of it.
/dev/mem and is not less secure because of it. They are basically just admitting the complete and utter failure of their previous access control. In windows \\device\physicalmemory used to be controlled via an ACL. This method is good enough for Linux, so I don't understand why this isn't good enough for Microsoft.
Basically, Microsoft is breaking a whole crapload of things that don't need to be broken. Several of these changes impact me, and I can tell you that they are not improving security by turning these features off. Actually, they are reducing security by turning these off because now every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there need to go and write their own kernel mode driver to re-implement the missing functions.
For example, in SP1, there is no longer _any_ way to access physical memory from userspace, period. This is perfectly idiotic. Linux has
To further tighten security on new installations, the Post-setup Security Update Wizard blocks all incoming traffic until the latest updates are applied and Automatic Updates are configured.
We have our own tools to perform updates.
No. Windows 3.1 was a GUI on top of DOS. The real reason why you saw so many crashes and blue screens on the Win9x line is what the grandparent post said. This is why there were "familiar" places the OS would crash. It's because another app or driver would consistently write to that location and, since the separation wasn't there, blue screen the box.
-Shippy
Windows 3.1 (extended mode) took over memory management as well as DOS was real mode and Windows (ext) was Protected Mode.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
First off, I was doing this think called joking . Secondly, this technique isn't uncommon anyway, with things called "demilitarized zones" in network management. You build a three-segment network, one segment being the world at large (entirely untrusted from the server perspective) the next segment being the userland machines on your network (semi-trusted from the server perspective), and the third being the servers (entirely trusted). You configure which set of machines get which access privileges through the routing device (any router is a computer, just a specialized one) so that only certain things get through in certain ways. One might port forward or proxy all connections from the world but allow direct routing on a limited number of ports from the userland segment.
At work we route three MUX rings' worth of sites, about 120 sites total, 30,000 machines across the entire WAN on the scale of a city, and the traffic is being handled at the concentration point for all major servers and the outbound internet connection by... drum roll please... a Linux box. That's right, a Linux box. An Intel-based 64bit PCI machine with six gigabit cards and an extensive routing table. It's probably the most stable thing on the network, and hasn't burned out like so many of the switches and routers out in the field due to poor quality fans. It'll probably handle a bunch more traffic than we are throwing at it, too.
So, we could have spent a shitload on a switch like you so advocate, or we could have spent the $3,000 to build this computer. We chose the computer. It's definitely not 'hobbyist'.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
especially being able to control TCP/IP down to the port level
You can get it with RRAS. Unfortunately, it is the worst UI ever. You can't specify ranges - who's the dumbass who failed to have that idea?
I have to agree with Microsoft on this one. It is long past time for MS to bite the bullet and stop worrying about breaking shoddy software from the dawn of time -- stuff that never should have worked, but did because earlier OSes allowed unforgiveable sloppiness. There are a lot of app.s out there that deserve to die and be replaced by correct code.
I'm very much in favor of preserving backward compatibility for decent software, but many PeeCee products are great examples of how not to design and build software, and they should go. Now.
(Can you tell how many hundreds of hours I've lost trying to get antiproductivity software running for someone who simply *must* have it?)