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Microsoft Claims Firms 'Hitting a Wall' With Linux
maxifez writes writes to tell us that Microsoft has released yet another independent study downplaying the viability of Linux at the enterprise level. The study claims that Windows is "more consistent, predictable, and easier to manage than Linux." From the article: "The study, commissioned by the software giant from Security Innovation, a provider of application security services, claimed that Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts." Vnunet.com has also provided a PDF of the original report.
The key, as always with these "studies", is to find the portion where it deviates from Reality. That is, where it uses some strange definition or where the sysadmins choose some bizarre action.
...
In this "study", that step into UnReality begins where all systems are required to stay on the same time-line for upgrades.
This means that what would otherwise be a normal upgrade from SLES 8 to SLES 9 instead becomes a strange mix of back-porting patches from SLES 9 to SLES 8. In other examples, the sysadmins are downloading code from the glibc and mysql sites and applying it to those server WITHOUT TESTING. So, over time, the SLES systems become unstable.
Meanwhile, no non-Microsoft supplied code is applied to the Windows boxes.
Of course, the one who commissions the "study" gets to choose the criteria
"The study compared two teams of experienced IT administrators running Windows Server 2000 and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 8, then monitored their progress as they upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 9."
But the PDF says:
"Specifically, for the database server role, we considered three configurations; Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003, Oracle 10g on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and MySQL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. In order to produce a meaningful comparison of platforms, the systems studied were manually installed and their configurations were verified."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is the only Linux distribution listed in the PDF. Also the fact that "the systems studied were manually installed" is probably why the upgrade was problematic. If you want your upgrade to be easy, install from the distribution, not manually. I also wonder why they did not test MySQL and Oracle 10g on windows. There are windows versions of these software packages. When you are comparing systems running different software, you are not just doing an OS comparison. You are also comparing the software packages. They might just as well have compared Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 running Oracle 10g to Windows Server 2003 running Microsoft Access 2003.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Weekly reboots.
Get a copy of Win2K3 on your box. Create a directory that's 3 directories below the root.
Put 200,000 files in that directory (size of each file does not matter).
Now, watch the application that reads and writes files to that directory get slower and slower over time. Until you need to reboot the box.
For an instant problem, open that directory in Explorer. All of your processor speed will be eaten by the "system" process. Even after you close Explorer. Rebooting is the only thing that will clear the problem.
The problems start at page 25. Here's the beginning:
Whitepaper location:
http://www.securityinnovation.com/reliability.sht
My 2000 Advanced Server uptime:
/help for more detail.
C:\Documents and Settings\wysoft>uptime office
\\office has been up for: 121 day(s), 0 hour(s), 39 minute(s), 23 second(s)
Estimate based on last boot record in the event log.
See UPTIME
Bite it.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
What similar technology even exists in windowsland?
Not to be a MS fanboi, but sysprep works pretty well alongside Ghost.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
The link posted in the story is not correct.
m l
Just click through and don't give them any info. You can still download it.
http://www.securityinnovation.com/reliability.sht
I don't know if you RTFA, but I did...
/. Editors Here]
then I looked at the linked PDF and got confused,
because that PDF is about database security.
The correct Link:
MS Summary Page
The PDF
[Your Complaint About
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
FTA:
Acknowledgements
This study and our analysis were funded under a research contract from Microsoft
o_0
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Active Directory is integrated but going with any type of directory service makes the overall desgin more complex. Does it help "some" organizations? Yes, but you pretty much have to use AD if you want to use Microsoft. Now could someone please explain to me why Microsoft still uses Domains with AD? Doesn't a true directory service not use Domains? Also can you have two people in different OU's on the same "domain" with the same exact name. Something like
ou=marketing,uid=myLogin
ou=hr,uid=myLogin
with only one server?
NTFS vs Unix file permissions. This use to be true but no longer, read up on ACL's in Linux and Unix, they have been around for a while. I would point to secure Linux and say that Microsoft doesn't have anything that competes in this arena. Granted this is somewhat complex and a lot of shops don't need it.
IIS is easy to configure, but then again using YAST or any of the webmin tools make Linux/UNIX a snap to configure. I would argue it is easier to admin a server with webmin than it is to learn all the Microsoft admin tools.
SMS is finally a decent package for Windows only shops. So is WinInstall and other products.
Oracle VS SQL Server. Oracle is free for one processor, 2GB of RAM and a 4GB database size. It runs on multiple platforms and it's target market is for higher end databases. It can mount XML, TAB delimeted and other files natively as tables. That is very very nice to developers. SQL Server has the DTS stuff. DTS is very nice for moving data around, but not as nice as actually mounting files as tables. Oracles Enterprise manager is very comparable to Microsofts, and at least with Oracles EM you can actually sort data after you view it AND you can see the SQL that is being generated by the query. I will say that the query builder in SQL server is very nice. I can't comment on DB2... All in all I would say that both are very friendly to developers, but one is free for small to mid size shops and one is not.
Now I find the core difference in Windows and Linux is that most shops do a LOT more on one Linux/Unix box than one Windows box. Most Windows shops (ours included), have a Windows server for one specific task, perhaps two tasks. Most Linux and Unix boxes run many different tasks and as such you need far less of them. Perhaps this is just the attitude of Windows users to purchase more servers because they are "cheap" but I can say that every place I have been this is the case. Most Unix/Linux guys you talk to mention two things, their uptime AND the amount of crap that is running on their boxes. Most Windows guys I talk to mention the number of servers they manage. So in short this needs to be factored in as well. This issue may also come from all the DLL hell that has plagued Microsoft for years, or the fact that it was difficult to impossible to run different versions of SQL server on the same box.
You are correct in mentioning security as a major concern. The constant amount of patches and reboots needs to also be factored in. You start to really need tools like SMS when you have 100 to 500 Windows servers that need patched as often as they do. Now if you replace those servers with say 10-20 high end Linux boxes then the need for an SMS type of application starts to diminish. This is not to say that you couldn't use a product like E-Directory and Red Carpet to manage those boxes, but the need isn't as great.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Kickstart - http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/KickStart-HOWTO.html
Welcome to the new world.
-zariok-
The reason Windows locks an executable file that is in-use is that it uses it as a kind of mini-swap file. If you need to swap part of that binary's code out to disk, windows doesn't - it just forgets it. If it needs that code back in memory, it reads it directly from the file on disk.
All modern Unix-type systems, including Linux, do the same thing. Yes, that means you can have a situation where:
What happens? Nothing much. It works just fine. How? Because when I said the program was "deleted" in step three, I wasn't being precise. What really happened was that the program was "unlinked". That removes the directory entry and makes it so no process can create a new reference to the file. But any running processes already have a reference to the file, and the actual file stays in existence until all references (both filesystem references and process references) to it go away.
This holds true for all files, too, not just executables. For example, it's not uncommon for me to start a download then, while the download is running, decide I don't like where it's being written. No problem. I just move it. As long as I'm not moving it to a different file system, the download process doesn't care, because it isn't writing to "/home/shawn/foo.tar.gz", it's writing to "the file handle referencing inode 274327". It doesn't matter a bit if that inode happens to get relinked into a different part of the file system.
No, there's no excuse for this particular bit of Windows braindamage. The Unix solution is better in every way.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I don't have a lot of experience with Windows, but Kickstart is one of the most impressive pieces of Linux software that I've used.
Network PXE boot, enter a configuration file location and sit back while Kickstart configures and partitions your server, downloads and installs all your packages, runs post-installation scripts to install updates and start all your services, and finally reboots your completed server. All without any intervention.
Not to mention that if you ever need to re-deploy that server, or deploy a similar server, you can reuse the configuration file to guarantee the server is identical.