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..."

Comments

Running Win Server 2k3 as a Workstation

[mr.henry]

Love Windows 2000 and don't want to bother with XP? You can always run Windows Server 2003 as a workstation with this guide.

Re:Running Win Server 2k3 as a Workstation

[nordicfrost]

Well, she must have been seen as an asset, as she apparently was offered a 25% raise over two years time for not leaving MS sales. She now has a job for a local company in another own, her home town. They moved after not enjoying the capital too much. But she apparently misses MS and they want her back, says the GF's friend (talked to her on MSN...)

Also, it seems that the MS sales persons are truly out of it some chatting with others in the development business now revealed another story about a lame MS attempt to sell in solutions. They were offered lunch to hear out the offer from the sales person. They listened politely to the sales chat and then confronted the guy with such questions as mean uptime, compability with older equipment etc. He couldn't answer it, and was finally asked: Why should we replace the Linux domain servers, firewall and file servers with your products? The reply was "Well, the TCO of Windows Server is lower" at which point F burst out in laughter at the restaurant. He replied "You want us to pay XXX money for replacing the software, which by the way requires XXX in hardware upgrades. All this to replace free software legacy systems that had 0 downtime over two years?" at that point they said 'thanks for the lunch, you're paying.' and left.

The sales droid got a bit upset and tried to mention something about Linux being more expensive to maintain, and he replied that they could easily afford the two days of onsite tech for maintanence a year and how many times a year would they require someone to look at the Windows systems?

Service Pack vs Version

[ferreth]

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.

Re:Win2k & Server 2k3

[Shippy]

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.

Re:Win2k & Server 2k3

[fireman sam]

Windows 3.1 (extended mode) took over memory management as well as DOS was real mode and Windows (ext) was Protected Mode.

Feeding the trolls despite my better judgement

[TWX]

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'.