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."

Comments

The full story

[mparaz]

The eWeek article is just a summary. The full story is here.

Re:Integrated

[Tony Hoyle]

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.

Re:Integrated

[HairyCanary]

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.

Re:Integrated

[Dolda2000]

I don't know what Unix system you use, but on my GNU/Linux system (which uses the same APIs), based on GNU libc, the get*ent APIs are implemented using nameswitch modules, which can do lookups in LDAP, NIS, /etc/passwd, /etc/passwd.db, a MySQL database, or anything else. And indeed, it will be on the complexity order of whatever that algorithm chooses -- it's not a flat search.

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).

Never understood the name

[vijayiyer]

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.

Re:Windows POSIX implementation

[sconeu]

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.