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Microsoft to Stop Releasing Services for Unix
lilrowdy18 writes "According to a recent article, Microsoft will stop releasing any new versions of Services for Unix. SFU 3.5 will continue to be supported until 2011 and will have extended support until 2014. From what the article hints at, Microsoft wants Unix interoperability integrated into the OS. Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures."
Embrace and extend! UNIX is doomed! Mwahahahahaha!
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Microsoft are moving to it as well as Apple!
Imagine...what a novel concept...the ability to interact with a Unix system...they should patent that!
Dave
"Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures." seldom i heard them being so true about themselves.
free 880 megs file hosting - www.FTPZ.US - best
And if you really need a real Unix / Linux on XP then colinux can provide it running at near-native performance.
The eWeek article is just a summary. The full story is here.
I support a Solaris based printer, and with SFU 3.5 I can make the customer's Windows server host the jobs, and make them responsible for the NFS server, while all I have to do is add one line to vfstab. This is one good thing Microsoft has done (and Slashdot, I first read of them freeing it here).
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Hmmm, when Windows NT was still new, there were great plans to implement not only the win32 API, but also the DOS and win16 APIs, and even POSIX! All of these were implemented to some extent, but the POSIX personality never reached a state where it was really usable.
Knowing that, and knowing all the announcements that Microsoft has been making about great new features that were going to be in Longhorn, and the subsequent withdrawal of nearly all of those features, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will be providing POSIX compliance in Windows.
Of course, there's always Cygwin. And BTW, what came of CoLinux?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
A while ago I asked a few people on irc if there was a way to access nfs shares in windows and was told no.... would these unix services let me do that ?
The negative spin is right there in the headline - makes it sound like MS is dropping Unix interop support, when in fact they're integrating it more tightly into the Windows core to improve it.
I pity the poor admins who had made SFU an integral part of their enterprise installation. Those ads run by Microsoft in Linux magazines for free SFU trials turned out to be "too good to be true," as many of us suspected.
At last years TechEd Microsoft announced
Ten Year support on all products.
Umm 2011.... sounds a bit closer than ten years.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Will this mean poorer unix services? In the pre-OS X days, Apple File Services (AFS) for Windows was always years out-of-date, making Windows clients perform better than Apple clients on networks with Windows servers. The result was that poor-performing Mac clients soon disappeared. The truly paranoid might think MS did this on purpose or that MS had something to gain by keeping AFS out-of-date. ...but it was just business and allocation of resources, Right? Just happened to work out that way.
Instead of Microsoft SFU, perhaps it would be better known as Microsoft STFU?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Everytime I read "SFU", my brain tried to parse it as "STFU"...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"Windows Vista feature protects data from reboots" shows us how, by not supporting "unlink when in use" filesystem feature (all unices do), Windows offers to save our unsaved documents upon upgrade-required reboot..
...
gtkaml.org
but reinventing it. By moving this capability into the OS instead of hosting it as a parallel OS on the same kernel, they will gain performance and increase integration.
This is actually just one more example of an acceleration of rumors of Longhorn features. The rumors were that Longhorn would be able to run Unix applications and, specifically, x86 Linux binaries without recompilation. It looks now like at least a portion of that capability will appear in SP2 for Win 2003 Server a full year before Vista release.
Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures
Past architectures? M$'s been developing this SFU thing for PDPs or what? I bet Vista isn't shit different from XP.
"designed to allow the recompiling of Unix applications on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows releases"
One Question, why? If you've got the best why use the rest? Maybe they're scared of the all the open source movement code that is being written for *nix
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures.
Because, unbeknownced to the world, Microsoft is using a BSD kernel in Vista.
Use Cygwin.
"the POSIX personality never reached a state where it was really usable"
;)
Wasn't this needed in order for Windows to be used by certain US governmental agencies that stipulated that all OSs they used must have POSIX compliance. If I'm right in thinking that they must have been accredited with being POSIX compliant from someone so it can't have been all that bad...
You're right that Cygwin's the way to go though. I'm hoping that one day Microsoft will resurrect Xenix and port the Win32 API to it
I think that Microsft has looked at how well Apple has used BSD in their OS offering, and the wheel began turning.
They have been targetting Unix for a while, and this is aimed squarely at killing off Unix as a viable alternative inside of 5 years, as Win for Workgroups was aimed at Novell. Their other target are the switchers from Unix who tend to gravitate towards BSD or Linux. Doing this will give an option that will be quite tempting, given their installed base.
Off course, could be a bit more smoke and mirrors designed to bait switchers....
Just my two cents.
For every present, there is a past
``I don't know about now, but at the time Microsofot did the POSIX implementation it wasn't so much that MS version of it was useless, it was more that the spec itself was useless. It did not have things like printing and network access, so in all reality not one single useful application in the world could say it was POSIX compliant.''
Wow, slow down for a bit. You're saying three different things here and presenting them as a single argument.
First, your argument that POSIX is useless. Certainly, POSIX does not standardize everything under the sun. That wouldn't be possible, and it wouldn't be a good idea either. That doesn't make it "useless". It standardizes the interface to a lot of system functionality, from basic file I/O to sockets, threads and shared memory. This facilitates porting of applications between conformant systems - for many applications, the core functionality would not need to be rewritten for a new system. POSIX-compliance is what causes most open-source software to quickly spread to all alternative operating systems, whereas it takes a long time to get ported to Windows.
Then, the point about the Microsoft POSIX implementation being useless. Last I read about it, it said that the POSIX personality and the win32 personality were basically completely isolated from one another. POSIX process ids are separate from win32 process ids, POSIX processes cannot start win32 processes, and communication between the two types of processes is difficult. In addition, large parts of POSIX were unimplemented, which means that many POSIX apps simply wouldn't work on NT.
And then the claim that no single application in the world can claim to be POSIX-compliant. Well, just because not everything in an application is also specified in POSIX doesn't make it not POSIX compliant. As long as everything that is in POSIX is also done the POSIX way in the application, it can be called POSIX-compliant. And for the record, there are hordes of applications that are purely POSIX; basically any Unix command-line program or daemon is a good candidate.
Finally, an interesting bit of knowledge: although POSIX is typically associated with Unix-like systems, there are other systems that are POSIX-compliant, too. IBM's MVS and VMS are two examples.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Say Windows is fully POSIX-compatible. No major applications claim "POSIX" compatibility -- developers still write for Unix dialects, and the Linux dialect has become the dominant Unix API dialect format. Windows will still have to develop seperately for Windows.
`` I'm hoping that one day Microsoft will resurrect Xenix and port the Win32 API to it ;)''
They can just use the (old) BSD-licensed WINE code and "embrace and extend". After all, that's what Cedega did.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
- i mean, fair's fair, right? :-)
Honestly, in the 15 years that I've been forced to work with Windows, I've never met anybody that actually used this (yes I know the service isn't that old...you know what I mean).
Will it really be missed?
I don't see it as having any sort of hampering effect whatsoever.
I seem to recall that Microsoft recently bought SFU from some company, or acquired the whole company, or somesuch. I can't remember clearly. But if that is the case, and now they are announcing that the product will be discontinued, isn't that another nice instance of Microsoft killing interoperability with Unix?
Yes, they say they will keep supporting it and that the features will be integrated...but I for one don't believe that's going to make things better in any way.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
that my girlfriend and parents were doomed to reinvent Unix...
Fancy that.
is its posix on win32 rather than posix on NT
This makes certain things (most notablly select) rather difficult to implement and slow.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Because, you know...AIX has all those features. Oh, did you mean Linux?
Blar.
MS makes a product named "shut the fuck up" ?
As a mostly-Linux developer who has done his share of Linux->Windows porting, the lack of fork() and pipe() are easily the most irritating aspects of programming for Windows.
Oftentimes in security code, you want to know which process is speaking to you on the other end of a pipe. Under Linux, this is very easy. Under Windows, it is a huge bear, not the least reason for which is that Windows lacks the concept of a named pipe, so you have to make something up based on shared memory or some other such garbage.
And fork()... well, as anyone who has written a fork()-based program (i.e., one that doesn't just exec() right after forking) knows, this entirely changes the structure of the application. Yukk.
Last I head, pipe() and fork() are both POSIX, so I hope these system calls appear when Microsoft takes the plunge and replaces their crappy kernel and API with something closer to UNIX. Given how long UNIX has been around and how much important software exists for it and is being developed daily (mostly on Linux and MacOS these days), I can't wait until we can finally declare system API "victory" and move the fight to something that causes much less irritation for developers.
[ home ]
Given the corporate focus on creating Web-distributed applications and repositories, any implementation of NFS (or any other Unix-centric protocol) for Windows is becoming irrelevant except in a LAN setting. Back ends supporting such repositories tend to be deployed on specific platforms, so interoperability there is a non-issue.
;-P
Perhaps they're ackowledging that Samba does SMB better than they can do NFS
If there was ever a necessary evil that remained evil, it's Samba. Not that I'm slagging the dedicated guys that keep trying to figure out MS's ever-changing mutilation of LANServer, but it is a sonofabitch to get working right.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bill Gates' SWOT ANALYSIS:
Strengths:
1. Marketing == Massive propaganda machine.
2. Proprietary == Huge market penetration.
3. Rich applications == User lock-in.
Weaknesses:
1. Bloated and frankly god-awful code-base
2. Expensive to maintain, insecure etc
3. Cant really afford to start from scratch
4. Cant steal Linux due to GPL
Opportunities:
1. Use BSD
2. Convert some UNIX/Linux/BSD sites
3. Remove some barriers to entry at UNIX shops
Threats:
1. Linux
2. IBM
3. Open Sourcerors
The logical BUSINESS APPROACH is this:
1. Grab BSD.
2. Break the interfaces.
3. Call it "WinBSD".
4. Creat compatibility layer: "WinBSD-API"
5. Patent "WinBSD-API" so you now own WinBSD
6. Trivial porting exercise
7. Brand it like youve never branded before
What does this give you?
-It gives you something that looks like Windows and works like Windows, but is better than it.
-It leaves you with all your existing apps and protocols still working at minimal update cost.
-It means your customers expensively bought/developed apps will still work.
-It give UNIX shops one less reason to reject windows as a solution.
-It locks out OS/3rd party developers due to the broken (and patented) WinBSD interface.
-It offloads a large amount of knackered code.
Now add all this up and it gives MS EXACTLY what they have always strived for: Continuing user lock-in to the Windows monopoly while maintaining a very painful barrier to anyone else who wants to write for the platform.
Disclaimer: I am not an OS guru so there will be some technical issues with my analysis. Im just looking at it from a business point of view.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
As a BSD user, I understand the attractiveness of Unix. I can see M$ was trying to get people like me to feel a bit better about their software.
But I don't get the real consequences of this -- what are the Unix-lovers going to do, now that this product is officially dead?
E.g. switch entirely to NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD? Port the Unix userland they need to NT? Buy other crap from other people? Run Windows and a BSD on the same machine under some weird emulation?
How will this change impact actual (power) users?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Pardon me for this rather puerile exclamation, but...
LINUX RULES!!!!!
Now that I got that out of my system, I return you to our regularly metered out diet of sanity.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Giant awakens from life-long coma only to realise 50,000,000 people could actually, maybe, perhaps have a point..
I said before that Microsoft has given up on their own disaster of a codebase, and is building Longhorn/Vista on top of BSD.
.Net for BSD, They've shown no real interest in cross-platform support, but this move ensures that .Net will be ready for a BSD-based Longhorn/Vista.
In addition to this new story stating that Unix compatibility will be built in, there is also:
- The earlier stort titled "Longhorn to use UNIX-like User Permissions".
- The fact that Microsoft has been pushing everyone to use the BSD license, and to convert GPL'd software to BSD (thus making it available for Microsoft to embrace it as closed source).
- The fact that Microsoft released
Start->Run->bash ?
Just ask Dave Cutler.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Windows NT from the get go has always had this notion of various subsystems that can sit on top of the raw OS layer. It is most common to use the Windows subsystem but there was for a time a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem so that applications written to either could run under Windows. Over time maintenance of these subsystems was abandoned but I read somewhere that the next go around of Windows is going to have a fully compliant POSIX subsystem.
This is my sig.
Will they still offer Service Training For Unix?
CoLinux works quite well, actually.
Now microsoft must bow to a better platform, with more room for growth, vast security potential, user permissions, and proper user and kernel space.
Windows can authenticate with a NIS server and mount users' home directories via NFS.
Though I might have to wait until the genetic engineers manage to fit wings onto pigs first.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Shouldn't it have been called Unix Services for Windows? In another example of MS marketing spin, they act as if SFU somehow does something for Unix, when it instead adds basic functionality to Windows. I used SFU for about 1 month. I still was so frustrated doing Fortran development under Windows that I wiped the drive and installed Linux.
SFU takes care of the AD schema mods required to allow *nix LDAP clients authenticate. There's nothing more painful than having to deal with account mgmt in large environments, and MS AD provides the super-easy (read: intuitive) GUI for managing a centralized directory service. Yes, there are alternatives like OpenLDAP, Sun One, etc., but none even come close to the MS implementation from an ease-of-use standpoint.
They are going to stop it so it's now temporary.
I thought Windows NT was a "better Unix than Unix"... I'm sure I remember Bill telling me that.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Now that the native NT API is more or less available, would it be possible to rewrite those bits of cygwin that could benefit to use it on systems where it's available? (Remember cygwin still has to run on win98)
I am trolling
Unix interoperability integrated into the OS? They must be using UNIX source code. ;-)
Somebody tell SCO!
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
...other than your "not O(n)" assertion, which was not made in a convincing way at all.
It will no more be called "Services for Unix" but "Services for Linux".
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
It's far easier than NFS. Samba sharing, point your web browser to swat and follow the wizard. NFS sharing I have spent days trying to do before giving up.
I am trolling
Not only that, but code doesn't magically stop working just because the original producer no longer supports it.
Yet.
SFU for Windows 2000 Server won't stop working after the Windows 2000 EOL, but "Trusted" Computing is the future. Software will be "sold" on a model that resembles rental more than anything else and, just like time-limited beta software, will no longer execute after its end of life. The new wrinkle with "Trusted" Computing is that you won't just be able to roll back your system clock, as rented software will rely on an approved and unmodified kernel along with signed time stamps from a trusted organization, such as the software publisher, the OS vendor, or a stable government, acquired using a protocol resistant to replay attacks.
Wouldn't that give *NIX a real chance to meet Microsoft in the middle? Given enough transition to a WinBSD (something that goes against the very laws of nature!), WinBSD apps could be made to work on any kind of *NIX with little effort!
No more "Windows for compatibility, or Linux because it doesn't suck"!
Not only "land of the free" but "land of the lawyers" who love a good old 1st amendment smackdown. Shihar 153932
Have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/R2/unix components/default.mspx.
There's NFS built in to Windows Server 2003 R2.
I've been running it under XP for a couple of months at work, and I've never had a problem with it. My uptime is currently two weeks, since I had to patch and reboot the hosting XP instance. Performance is excellent, and the virtual machine behaves exactly as advertised: an entire VM with its own vertualized hardware and everything. Obviously I wouldn't want to play game or watch screen savers in it, but I only ssh to it anyway.
For simple share-level security, Samba is one-two-three...at least on debian and gentoo. Admittedly I've never run it as a domain controller or anything, but I do use it instead of NFS for unix-to-unix sharing b/c NFS doesn't work right on my boxen.
fuck is going on
mental weaklings, you can do no better but giggle and sneer
The Microsoft unix services are mainly made of PC-NFS (from mid-90's, which included nfs, telnet, ftp and some other basic things. very inferior to cygwin. sure for printing and basic file sharing it'll work, but for high order Unix integration it's useless. also the X11 stuff in there is particularly bad
I have a Unix Service disc that someone gave me at a conference, but I only use Windows to play video games. The thought of Windows interacting with my *nix machines is too scary for me to even think about opening that package. Can I get Windows viruses from touching the disk? Its in an airtight plastic baggie right now.
So you need a lp server for Windows? NFS sharing? Basically, what you need is a Unix service for Windows?
...and the package that enables Unix services for Windows is of course called Windows Services for Unix...
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
I've been using SFU for over a year now, and aside from a few pieces of software that don't work (gtk+2.x being the main showstopper), everything is smooth. I'd have to say the best use of SFU is that it allows me to run server applications written for Unix. Apache+PHP works quite well (native NT version is still flaky), so does tnftpd, and sshd. In fact, there is quite a lot of Windows administration that can be done through an ssh session nowadays. 'netsh' is a big help, but some of it is still ugly.
This is particularily nice in my office, where I want to share a few files and a small wiki with other employees, but I can't necessarily hook up a Unix box to the network, nor do I want to install the staggering behemoth of IIS.
Where do you think all the money for those lawyers came from?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is why this wasn't possible with NT4.
Yes, there are some challenges (process creation overhead), but the fact is that NT4 tried to do this and failed miserably primarily because Microsoft didn't make a serious effort. Remember all the talk about how NT4 had a POSIX subsystem, etc? Remember how badly the POSIX subsystem sucked on NT4?
Most of the rest of it (NFS, LPD, NIS) are merely network protocols and have been supported in some form or another on NT4.
Actually this is one thing I suggested before leaving Microsoft in 2003. Maybe someone is still reading the papers I wrote......
Basically though, it is not the technology that is allowing it this time around. It is the marketing will. That is all.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How can Microsoft extend support through 2011 and beyond when Linux will have bankrupt MSFT by 2010?
- No Sig for you!
Samba a son of a bitch to setup? What are you smoking? Samba was the easiest thing I ever setup on a Solaris box. On top of that, I didn't even attempt to use Swat to configure it.
If you are trying to integrate Samba into an AD environment, then good luck. Basic file and print sharing is BRAINLESS to get working with Samba. Hell it took me all of 20 minutes to setup Samba as a NT 4 compliant PDC and convert 10 W2K boxes to operate as domain members.
It's called POSIX. Look where that went.
Luckily I have a (old) copy of Intergraph's NT_NFS, so I dont need to fart around with samba, nor worry about Microsoft's newest bastardisation of their OS.
I found myself gazing most skeptically at this article. I might take this announcement with a few less grains of salt if Windows had EVER once been compatible out of the box with more than ONE other thing... Windows. In my long turmoil filled experiences with MS's monster I have never once got it to recognize another file system besides it's own, FAT, FAT32 and NTFS, directly out of the box.
HFS+? Pu-lease. UFS? You wish. Ext3? Keep dreaming.
NOTHING WORKS! Sure there are add-ons and programs and so on and so forth, but nothing that will allow a generic drone to take his USB thumb drive formatted in some other format other than the M$ approved 3 and allow him to plug it into a windows machine and USE it.
Repeat after me Microsoft. "Owning the world doesn't mean there is nothing else."
I don't know about everyone else but it will be a FINE day when I can format my portable storage in some other format than FAT.
P.S.: I don't hate Windows... "Hate" is far too vague.