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."
The eWeek article is just a summary. The full story is here.
You can use PAM LDAP for login against an AD.
:)
And, of course, samba.
Is this enough "Client for Microsoft Networks"?
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.
Why pity them? They will still be supported for another 6 years (9 if they want extended support). They just aren't releasing any new versions of it.
Even still, some of the next-gen SFU functionality is being integrated into Windows Server 2003 R2. It's not the end of unix interoperability from Microsoft, just this derivation of it.
It was released in January of 2004, so mainstream support should end 2009, extended support ends 2014. Sounds like they decided to extend mainstream support 2 years to 2011 and still end extended support in 2014. No conspiracy to see here.
If 'ls -l' is doing a lookup for each line then your nscd is not running or broken.
All user information (and host) on Unix is cached - and the cache is *not* a linear lookup.
Username/PAM lookup is *not* linear. If I call getpwnam for example it goes to pam -> active directory -> username lookup. There's no searching involved.
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
I have a gaggle of Solaris boxes that authenticate to LDAP (which AD is) and I do not see any appreciable delay due to the username lookups. And yes, our LDAP directory has thousands upon thousands of users.
I will agree that there are a lot of things that should be done with the Unix "directory services", but not that which you describe. The greatest problem is that Unix still uses numeric UIDs, whereas it should be using symbolic UIDs (such as Kerberos principles).
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.
NT4 actually had a (not very functional) POSIX subsystem. It was needed to get certain government contracts that specified POSIX. The POSIX subsystem was removed/deprecated in Win2K.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Actually, the Santa Cruz Operation became Tarantella, which was recently bought by Sun.
The current entity calling themselves "The SCO Group" is what used to be called Caldera. They bought *something* from Santa Cruz (definitely their Operating Systems Division) and some sort of assets (but they can't produce the purchase agreement), and changed their name from Caldera to SCO. Allegedly this was for name recognition/branding, but apparently was really to sow confusion for their lawsuits.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I believe it was Interix (not InterOp as sibling post has it).
Interix was the product name, which survives today as part of SFU 3.5. The original vendor was Softway Systems. They wrote Interix; Microsoft bought Softway and rolled Interix 2.2SP1 into SFU 2.0.
The confusion, I guess, is that InterOp systems bought the domain interix.com. They now sell util ports to interix and interix-related services. But AFAIK InterOp had nothing to do with SFU/Interix itself.
That's true, where "Unix" == "Linux with nscd installed and running". Don't feel bad, these kinds of assumptions aren't new.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Your statement doesn't make any sense. Win32 is an API of which NT is one implementation.
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.