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Microsoft to 'Support and Usurp' Unix

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the highly-unlikely-in-the-near-future dept.

qedramania writes "Computerworld has a report on the latest Windows server release and their Unix strategy." From the article: "R2 is built on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and is geared towards specific workloads such as storage management, branch office server management, as well as identity and access management. It also provides a subsystem which supports Posix applications."

3 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Come on with the links... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why do article submitters assume us UNIX guys know all the latest buzzwords and upstart companies in computing? For the uninitiated, Microsoft are a software publisher who sell a toy operating system called Windows.

  2. NT has always had POSIX support by gonar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    and it has always sUxx0rd. incomplete, poorly implemented, not really POSIX.

    are they saying that they are doing it right now, or just pretending what is old is new?

    --
    The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
  3. Re:Anyone else see the contradiction? by lkcl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    the POSIX subsystem, like all microsoft "announced products", reappeared coincidentally at around the same time that opennt.com, which provided a full third party POSIX subsystem, disappeared.

    anyone may, if you have sufficient information on how the NT kernel works or are prepared to reverse-engineer it (like the ReactOS guys are doing), write their own subsystem. there are THREE types THAT I KNOW OF: OS/2, Win32 and POSIX. okay, maybe there are four now - win64.

    having a POSIX subsystem sit on top of the NT kernel, which is a microkernel based on the Mach microkernel, is NOT the same as having fast and direct access to the NT kernel functions.

    and the reason why the samba guys have such difficulty getting information is because there either ISN'T any (it's all in the code) or there's too much!

    the only reason why the CIFS documentation effort was initiated by microsoft is because the original people who worked on it (having embraced-and-sensibly-extended the IBM Lanman SMB spec and also the X-Open SMB spec), having retired with their stock options up to millions, left no clues as to how this HORRIBLY complex code worked.

    it was therefore ESSENTIAL that they get it documented.

    the first time they released cifsbrow.txt, in 1997, because i'd just spent five months network-reverse-engineering the network neighbourhood and WINS server code, i spent a WEEK throwing email messages at them, explaining various inconsistencies, helping them improve the documentation they'd created. it takes TWO YEARS to correctly implement the network neighbourhood. it's a FULL peer-to-peer registration and management system, very robust, very complex, _extremely_ good, and people have xxxx-all idea of quite how useful it is ("oh, it's netbios - switch that xxxx off")

    after the first CIFS conference, andrew, jeremy and i hung around for an extra day: i got to meet the guy responsible for the network neighbourhood, and spent a good couple of hours drumming into him the things that had been forgotten since the email flurry - there's nothing like meeting someone face-to-face to explain stuff, as you well know.

    so.

    i'd say that the reason proper documentation doesn't "exist" is partially deliberate, and partially it's your average development/management incompetence.

    l.