Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools

capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."

Comments

Unix Hardware

[jd]

Usually, this would mean a Sparc or MIPS processor (or four), possibly NUMA memory, probably a headless system, maybe very large disk arrays (forcing a 64-bit FS) - in other words, a hardware configuration that Windows would generally not be good on.

In this case, I think it really means hardware that Unix is running on, which could be almost anything.

Re:So what's Apache's problem?

[TheSpoom]

I've had a lot of experience (years) of running Apache on Windows, and it has been very stable for me, to the point that I can't remember a single crash in all the time that I was using it. That said, I'm pretty sure the gist of what they're saying is that Apache is most stable in a Linux / Unix-style environment, as that's what it's always been built for.

Besides, you shouldn't run a production web server on Windows unless you have a real need for it (ASP.Net comes to mind, and even then there are ways to run that in a Unix-style environment).

Re:Wait...

[killjoe]

It's MS that throws roadblocks on interoperability not the the other way around.

I agree that not having a monoculture is troublesome but only if you throw windows into the mix. MS tries it's best to lock the client into their solutions so they make it very hard to have any software other then MS in any network.

If you are going to choose a monoculture then go with unix, just don't let any windows box anywhere near your server room. Keep the windows boxes in the desktops of the users where it belongs.

Re:Poor Management and Poor Project Management

[earnest murderer]

Indeed. From reading the article it looks like the people doing the talking don't really know much about anything (except spin). No matter how anyone wants to skew blame, the administration decided to start the year without adequate testing, or a backup plan. "In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users." Apparently by "advisory" he means the documentation and release notes on the download page under the headding "IMPORTANT NOTE FOR APACHE USERS".

Generally...

[jd]

Heterogenius should not cause problems. A computer can't see another computer's hardware, or indeed software, it can only see the network traffic. Provided all machines speak a common network language, there is no problem.

The problem is when standards are violated, which most often is a Windows problem. Most of the problems with Samba (and Samba-NG) are caused by Microsoft, for example. Microsoft's current tiff with the EU, over not wanting to release network protocols to Open Source projects, isn't helping Microsoft's case any.

However, not all problems are due to Microsoft. The administration is, as has been noted by others, often to blame. Roxen, a rival Open Source webserver that supported SSL before Apache, is available for Windows 2000/XP. Apache 2.0.x has often been criticised for problems (causing many to stick with the 1.x branch) so if it's a problem with 2.0 which could be avoided with 1.x then they've only themselves to blame.

(And if they're using the Apache 2.1 tree for a production system, they're idiots.)

So there are solutions, you just need to look for them. Going with all-Windows, however, would not be one of them, unless you're working with a uniform Windows release, not just Windows. NEVER mix NT domains with Windows 200x domains, for example.

Also, because of architectural differences, drivers available for the XP core won't necessarily have counterparts in the 200x core. They may, but you cannot assume that. I believe it's XP that has IPv6 support, 2000 doesn't. That's just one example. The problem will likely worsen with Vista, particularly for graphics, as they've totally redesigned how graphics work. (Off-loading is a GOOD thing, but Microsoft has stated it doesn't document internal APIs, so compatibility isn't guaranteed.)

High-level software faces similar problems, where the API it is based on has been broken, so applications may or may not run correctly on different versions of Windows. DirectX software often faces this problem, as DirectX is not evenly maintained across code bases.

I would also avoid .Net like the plague. It is a solution looking for a problem and is the "in thing" for people to code to for now. But, then, so was Java. And CORBA. And RPC. And DCL. And, in earlier times, X.25, X.400 and X.500. Generally, for maintainability and longevity, you want to use as few layers as you can physically get away with. This is why virtually no Operating System in the world implements all 7 OSI layers and why layers generally bleed into one another.

All-*nix solutions are, as I've said, often better but they still have their problems. Binary-only software should work just fine on any *nix platform, because you can always ship the necessary libraries (and install whatever is not already there locally, using LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the local version), or you can statically compile.

In practice, *nix programmers are just as liable to take shortcuts that damage compatibility or which are dubious practices. It is unclear who has done so, in the arguments beween Hans Reiser and the other Linux kernel developers, but I can guarantee a fully-functional Reiser4 would be in the kernel by now if everyone was following good practices.

DSM (Distributed Shared Memory) should be independent of how processes are shared, but OpenMOSIX' DSM is unlikely to be folded into the main kernel any time soon.

Applications are no better - you can't guarantee Oracle or DB/2 running on Linux platforms they weren't compiled for, even though (as I've said - and was saying when Oracle first mooted a Linux port!) such incompatibilities are optional and the choice of the developer(s) involved.

It is almost impossible to design a system that prevents crappy programming (by later system developers or by application developers), and where attempts to do this HAVE been made, nobody wants to use the systems.

Re:Don't worry, the district is on top of it

[dedded]

You can probably read "accountability" as "accounting"

The old government General Accounting Office is now the Government Accountability Office.

Re:more info please

[LurkerXXX]

The Post may classify it as news, maybe as tax waste, but a 'news for nerds' story about windows not working right on 'unix hardware'? I think not.

Re:Some windows problems

[AliasTheRoot]

I have Apache 2, PHP5, PostgreSQL and mod_ssl all running happily on my desktop, wasn't really any harder than getting it running on *nix except for the ssl part.

Not Corruption, But Poor Contractor Performance

[reallocate]

It takes two to tango. Contractors cause more problems than their government clients.

In a former life I was a government employee deeply involved in bringing several IT systems online, from writing requirements to staff training to getting rid of something we didn't like.

Corruption of government employees was not an issue. Lack of research by government wasn't an issue.

The biggest single problem I saw was the creation of inadequate requirement specs. I saw this happen over and over for two reasons: 1) Governmenr employees lacked the technological backgrounded needed to express their needs in terms that their IT contractors could understand; 2) Contractors, especially those hired to help write the requirements, lacked awareness of their clients business needs and processes.

So, in effect, the government knew what it wanted to do but not how to translate that into a requirements doc, and the contractors did not know very much, and did not want to know very much, about the work done by their client. As a result contractors threw assorted pieces of their IT catalog against business processes they only vaguely understood.

I don't know how it works in DC, but in my environment, it would have been the contractor's responsibility to check the Apache website for that caveat about the Windows version. That's what they're paid to do.

Re:Some windows problems

[Mattintosh]

Quite true. But once you've done it at least once and distilled the actual need-to-do tasks from the process, it's about a 15-minute job.

1) Install Apache with the MSI installer. Do not reboot (it doesn't ask, so no problem).
2) Install PHP from the ZIP archive. Just unzip it to C:\PHP (or C:\PHP5 for even less config editing)
3) Install MySQL with the MSI installer. DO NOT REBOOT (yet).
4) Run through the MySQL Config Wizard when asked (at the end of the install).
5) Set the DocumentRoot and any VirtualHosts you want in the Apache config. It works just like other platforms.
6) Copy and rename the php.ini-recommended file to just php.ini. Set the doc_root and extension_root (extension root should be "./ext") settings, and uncomment (remove the semicolon) "extension=php_mysql.dll" and uncomment or add (if it's not there) "extension=php_mysqli.dll".
7) Find the PHP install.txt file. Find your system/HTTP server/version combination and add the lines they say to the end of the Apache config. There should be 2 or 3 lines. A copy/paste will suffice.
8) Right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Advanced tab, click Environment Variables... Now, on the bottom half of the dialog box are the environment variables for everyone (your user-specific ones are at the top). Find the one called "PATH" (not case sensitive, but is usually all upper-case) and add ;c:\php (or php5, if you named it that way).
9) Reboot. The environment variables aren't updated unless you reboot.

It's not a walk in the park, but after the first time and figuring out just where stuff is, it's pretty easy for a techie. Another note: I added stuff about VirtualHosts in Apache above, but didn't mention that you'll need to set up DNS entries or mess with your hosts file to get those to work. You can just skip the VirtualHosts if you don't know how to configure them. The rest of it will still work.

Re:Some windows problems

[ckaminski]

WAPO/LAPO.

Windows|Linux Apache PHP/PERL ***ODBC***

Please.

I had to set up a relatively identical testing site to my production site, using two databases, postgres and mysql, and soon postgres/mysql AND Oracle.

Getting WAMP to work with postgres was nearly impossible without a properly configured cygwin environment (even with), and getting WAMP to work with postgres AND ODBC was impossible.

I had to resort to a FC2 install on a VMware Pro setup to get it working. This isn't a problem on my Linux hosts. But I'm thoroughly sick of all these idiots building PHP/Perl tools only for MySQL. ODBC was built for a reason, why can't we use it?

<sigh>

Granted ODBC isn't exactly the perfect standard, but dammit, it's close enough for 99% of the projects out there currently.

Re:Some windows problems

[llefler]

You missed an important step. Under Windows I've always had to set old-passwords in MySQL's INI file to get it to work with PHP. And you should do it before you set your root password in MySQL. I always wait just long enough between installs to forget that.

Found It!

[Master of Transhuman]

Went looking for more info on this system.

Here's http://dcstars.k12.dc.us:50825/ the home page.

Here http://www.aalsolutions.com/7_esis/tech.asp is the technical specs of the eSIS system from the company who developed it, AAL.

As you can see, supposedly it works with everything - Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever. A three-tier system.

I got sidetracked in my search because I found a document that referenced IBM, so I thought they developed it. Nope - their Student Information Practice consultants were apparently contracted for implementation assistance only.