A Run Through Windows Server 2008

amcdiarmid writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Windows Server 2008 RC0 up on their site. It has a few good points, and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'. From the article's conclusion: 'Microsoft has used the time since the release of Windows Server 2003 very well. The new Server Manager simplifies system administration immensely. Unlike Windows Vista, whose new dialogues still confuse even experienced users, Windows Server 2008 makes the admin feel right at home and in control ... However, it's not all sunshine, either. Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly ... Microsoft also gets low marks for failing to include SSH support in the operating system. On Linux servers, working without SSH is simply unthinkable. At least the Redmond company includes its encrypted remote shell WinRS. However, secure FTP is still a missing feature. The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point where it is not even included in the Server Manager.'"

Comments

Re:Of course it's slow

[geeknado]

Obviously, you're joking, but actually Aero /is/ available as an optional install for Server 2008, according to TFA. Of course, so is a shell-only server, which I would've liked to have seen broken down a bit more. How're the command line management tools? Etc.

Re:Wall building?

[betterunixthanunix]

They want to differentiate themselves from Unix, in that you should never need such things. Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop. Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec. That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix," if I can be so bold as to reference my own handle.

Understandable.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is kind of explainable, given that most MSFT managers grew up in the era where WYSIWYG was the greatest thing since the sliced bread. They have always believed in GUI and never liked CLI much. So the tradition continues, less emphasis on anything script oriented and CLI oriented. Their idea of great script is a vbscript with its own GUI. We might not like it, but that kind of explains part of MSFT's way of working/thinking.

Lacking support for ftp, ssh etc are some vague attempt to create "value" to the non portable skill set developed by the windows admins. If the sys admins develop these skills and could easily run either linux or windows, then the switching cost for corporations to switch from windows to linux will decrease. Since the maximum revenue MSFT can extract from its existing installed base is capped by what it would cost its customers to switch to an alternative system, this is a very rational business strategy to keep them following a straight and narrow road to Redmond. And let us not blame just MSFT for this attitude. It is the customers who should realize the value of reducing their switching costs and demand better support for ftp, ssh and other linux side expertise they have in house. If customers don't demand it, why would a profit centered corporation deliver it?

Re:Of course it's slow

[jimstapleton]

Someone who likes glitz as well as server stuff.

Seems odd to me as well, but why deny them if that's what they want?

I certainly won't be using it when my servers get upgrade to 2k8

Re:Wall building?

[jimstapleton]

Of course their building walls, and definetly not bridges!

Windows go in walls not bridges!

And on that line, Linux is for Pirates! Because pirates, like penguins, are creatures of the sea. We BSD users... Are evil, except NetBSD, they are Pirates, as the pufferfish is a seacritter too.

Server Core

[Major Blud]

I think one thing that needs to remembered is that 2008 will also contain "Server Core", which is essentially Windows without a GUI. I haven't played with 2008 since the early candidates, but I'd bet good money that a lot of the performance issues and disk space usage can be minimized when running in Server Core mode.

Re:No SSH!?

[Psiren]

You are asking people to pay hundreds of dollars for your product, but out of the box it is crippled. Why is it crippled? I've never needed to ssh to a Windows server, nor has my colleague who has been administering Windows servers for 10+ years.

I just use the Remote Desktops app, which has all our servers listed. One click and a password and I have a console with a GUI, allowing me to do any administration tasks I need. Plus with the admin pack you can do a whole bunch of tasks straight from your workstation. Why would ssh make this process any easier?

Re:Wall building?

[Kjella]

Well, this isn't that difficult to understand, think of marketshare as the water level in a dam. If water is being artificially held back by a wall, you want to tear it down so the customers migrate to you. If you're artificially holding onto market share, you want to build walls so customers don't migrate away. Microsoft is still in basic monopolist strategy #1: Keep the market you have (desktop), make related markets work best with your monopoly (client to server) and prevent a mixed environment (server to server). They want the logic to flow like "Because we need Windows clients, we need Windows servers, because we run some Windows servers it's easier to have all Windows servers." While this site is overabundant with "slippery slope" arguments, it's the slippery slope to becoming an all-Microsoft shop. Or maintaining the analogy, that escaping Microsoft's monopoly is an uphill battle all the way. Sure, the EU has a little balls but I'm sure Microsoft knows they'll make more money in the long run by amking sure they stay in the Microsoft sphere of influence.

Re:Of course it's slow

[MindStalker]

Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.
Usually this is people with too much money who want as many toys as possible in setting up their home network... seriously...

Re:Double standards?

[MMC Monster]

Err... One would guess that a viable ssh is as necessary to a server as a TCP/IP stack is. It allows remote terminal-based administration. Didn't Windows create some sort of power shell recently? How are administrators supposed to use it remotely without ssh?

(I really don't know. I am not an administrator and certainly don't know much about servers.)

Built on Vista??

[myxiplx]

According to the article, server 2008 is built on Vista and includes product activation. o_0

Well that pretty much guarantees it's not coming on this network any time soon.

Re:Built on Vista??

[El_Oscuro]

I had an interesting experience today at work. Once of my coworkers asked about license management with Oracle. I told him that one could obtain the full unrestricted enterprise edition of the database by simply downloading it from their website. After constant dealing with WGA, activation, entering 42 digit serial numbers in Business Objects that didn't work, and a wide range of other licensing bullshit, he was absolutely shocked and didn't believe me. So I had him download the latest version of Oracle (11g) from the website.

Even though Oracle has about as much licensing hassle as your average Linux distro, it most definitely is not free. If you run it in any kind of production environment it every expensive, but they don't make you go through all of the licensing crap to enforce it. They ACTUALLY trust their customers somewhat. Of course if you want support or security patches, you have to have a license and a CSI number to access to support site. Essentially, Oracle's licensing model is similar to Red Hat's.

Why Microsoft can't use this licensing model is beyond me. Their server products have mission critical applications like Oracle databases so it should work fine. As far as home users go, most PCs come with Windows preinstalled, so the "custemers" with the licensing agreements would be the PC manufacturers.

I wish I had mod points, so I could lose your flamebait mod.

Re:Wall building?

[pseudorand]

> That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix,"

I'm a Linux admin by profession, but to be honest, I agree with you. MS has come a long way and is as good as or better than Linux in many respects. (Plenty stable, better hardware support, easy to use GUI that works [Linux command line Just Works(TM), but GUI's are still second rate compare to Windows] giving it a financial rather than educational barrier to entry.)

However, I'm not sure Mr. Balmer believes he's got a Better Unix than Unix yet, otherwise he would have include SSH. Why did Linux kill Unix? Because it was free? No, because it was BETTER. Why has Windows command line (which is actually pretty good or at least wsh, perl, ruby, php, tcl/tk, and all sorts of other command line tools that can do almost anything) still not taken off. Because they don't make it easy to access from anywhere. If they put SSH on Windows, people would start developing a lot more command line stuff for Windows (which is easier and faster that GUI crap) and Linux would have to either get better to stay relevant or die. Honestly, Windows isn't that expensive, and I wouldn't mind paying for it if it actually let me do what I needed it to do.

Re:Wall building?

[Stamen]

And this is the fundamental problem with using Microsoft technology. You can argue about this or that, but the main reason I don't spend much time using it is because it limits my skills. If you learn Microsoft technology, then your are basically limited to Microsoft technology; because they so often refuse to use standards, and insist on going their own way. If you learn Unix technologies, your skill is transferable to almost every other OS except Windows.

It's a brilliant business move by Microsoft, and the reason that IT people who work in Microsoft shops are so defensive of their technology. If their company changes to anything else, they will have very limited applicable skills.

I personally work with OS X and Linux, but if everyone wanted to change to Solaris, I could care less, after a day of getting adjusted, I'd be back up to full speed.

Re:Server Core is Crippleware

[imemyself]

What kind of Administrator would actually do upgrades? Upgrades *always* cause far more issues than they would solve, both on Windows and Linux. Clean installs are by far the best choice. Especially on a server where you want to make sure that there isn't some small problem somewhere in the install that will bite you in the ass later.

Re:Wall building?

[rrhal]

I think that's a pretty fair assessment - but at least you can set up a script and walk away while it cranks on a few thousand machines.

On a side note doesn't this all have the feel of reinventing X-Windows (at least in a way)?

But my mum told me to play nice...

[WebCowboy]

...becoause everyone is different and special in their own way!

Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop.

Well, historically the rest of the server OS universe HAS bee command-line-oriented and script-heavy, and remote access has been through RSH, Telnet and then SSH when encryption and strong authentication were needed. Nonetheless, int the Linux/BSD/UN*X world there has been a good amount of effort to accommodate the "Windows way". We have VNC, tunneling xwindows over SSH, and yes, there are even clients for Citric and Remote Desktop freely available (and sometimes included as part of an OS distribution).

Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec.

But Microsoft? Nooooo. Microsoft cannot tolerate differences. It insists we all play the game by their rules and if we don't, they take their marbles and go home. MS doesn't want mixed platform to be easy--they want it to be possible but annoying. The hope is that they can leverage their total desktop dominance to infiltrate the pointy-haired-boss-managed server market enough to hit critical mass, where managers get annoyed at having to maintain two different sets of administration tools, procedures, training resources, etc.

There is no technical reason whatsoever for Microsoft choosing one approach whilst barely acknowledging established practices. It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast. Obviously Windows IS capable, but MS consciously chooses to neglect such practices. SSH is part of the same problem--they could AT LEAST put in a proper SSH-supporting client fer cryin' out loud! A server would be nice too--not everyone wants to dedicate the bandwith for remote desktop connections. There are servers or other machines that require remote admin out in very remote locations sometimes, accessible only by low-speed cellular modems or packet radio. Remote GUIs at 9600 baud tend to be quite impractical compared to ssh, sftp and such. GUIs make a very poor interface for large-scale admin of, say large server farms and clusters.

Microsoft's model might be a "better UNIX than UNIX" within some narrow scope, but Microsoft continues to suffer from severe tunnel vision. It takes them a long time to bring things into focus that aren't right in front of them. Microsoft could've put a more concerted effort into WinFS and Monad and componentised Windows and interoperability tools but it didn't. It had instead to make 3 major releases of .NET and make a sparkly, glassy 3-D GUI and elabourate DRM technology. Meanwhile, the REAL promising technology remain mired in the research department or stumble out barely half-baked.

I'd send MS to the corner for its lousy behaviour.

Re:But my mum told me to play nice...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast.

This is the part of my life as a reluctant Windows admin which drives me up the wall. Windows fanboy monkeys (yes, they deserve to be called that) believe that Windows administration is some sort of game where one collects obscure secret codes, arcane magical marbles and byzantine "Swords of Brain-dead Cutting" from hidden caches in beetween the lines of some half-assed MSDN article by some MS insider or to be passed word-of-mouth when social networking with their buddies, all of this of course undocumented, because otherwise they wound't be, well, arcane, obscure and secret - would they? Naturally, this is the very anathema of proper operating system design where documentation of all commands (or source code if that is unavailable or ambiguous) is always available on demand to the admin. And this inane attitude of course only entrenches in my mind my personal experience of Windows being an unmanageable, unconrollable, arcane pile of vile secret shit loyal only to its MS master which is bound to turn around and bite you on the ass sooner or later.

Of course many admins, faced with this nonsense, opt for the "commerce" way and buy whole bunch of "add-ons" and "tools" for small fortunes to do but the simplest tasks which are made near impossible without either those tools, spending one's life parsing the MSDN Holy Scriptures line-by line or personally knowing some idiots who spend their lives doing just that.

Its maddening.

Re:But my mum told me to play nice...

[WebCowboy]

You're joking, right?

I Don't think he is. Windows is exhaustively documented, but not WELL documented in the slightest. There is a difference between the two. Much of what is in MSDN is useless, unclear and misleading...and it is so poorly organised it takes far longer to find what you need than it does to actually use what you've found.

Sure, the big slatwart projects have some reasonable documentation, but even then, you can't tell me widely used stuff like Apache Tomcat, Sendmail, ntpd or even X configuration is intiutive or well-documented.

I find, in general, that nearly all Linux distributions contain much superior documentation than Windows does, especially in documenting command line tools and config files it is completely and totally superior. Windows has no equivalent to "man pages" to speak of. I can tell you that ALL of Apache's projects are thoroughly documented AND well organised (and well indexed by Google--the on-line docs at apache.org are highly ranked). Of all the databases I've used, PostgreSQL seems to be the best documented, closed or open source (even though MSSQL Server 2005 has pretty good documentation on TRANSACT-SQL and how to use SOME of its GUI tools, documentation on its command-line stuff is hidden as if Microsoft is ashamed it exists--or, as the parent poster suggests, perhaps it is an "easter egg" to reward "elite admins"). Sendmail? Yeah, happens to be the among the most difficult mail servers out there to configure but it is pretty well documented. I prefer to use Postfix, and have also found Citadel to be both well documented AND intriguingly easy to set up as a very capable email server. ntpd? Why the heck to you NEED a lot of docs for ntpd? It's about as hard to use as a Showtime Rotisserie Grill(r)(tm). Even if it is less-than-intuitive it is nearly all better-documented than Windows stuff.

You usually end up trolling through newsgroup posts or a half-dozen pporly organized Wikis to try to find your answer in the open source world.

See, THIS is the point. You can type something into google and you find dozens to thousands of postings on the subject, and generally the top-ranked results aren't part of a "poorly-organised Wiki" either. Google for help with MS stuff and you get 2 things: Semi-relevant, barely useful MSDN articles, and search-engine-spam pages loaded with links to those same articles. It is maddening! Besides, I usially dont' have to resort to Google very much with open source stuff as the typical popular open source application is well-documented enough in the man-pages or at the project's website.

It's quite comparable to editing the Windows registry by hand or by command line to do all configuration. At least in the Windows world, you usually get a graphical representation of the configuration using some GUI tool, and that helps you make some sense of things.

You are missing the whole point! The "edit the registry"/command line/config file stuff is EXACTLY what is poorly documented in Windows stuff! And sorry to day, but quite often the GUI representation does more to confuse the situation than clarify, especially when it is a dialogue with 20 tabs or a gigantic regedit-like tree. Oh yeah...that brings me to the registry...what a pile of useless crap THAT is! One big monolithic repository stored in a small handful of binary files hidden in the bowels of a system folder somewhere, with management tools that are almost completely undocumented in the help supplied with the OS, where you have to comb the knowledgebeast to find answers, and if you change the wrong setting there is no undo, and if it's really wrong you cannot reboot. I can't believe you'd mention the registry as a defence for Windows, because all too often you HAVE to edit the registry because some fast-n-friendly GUI app has hosed it. Hundreds of text-based config files in the /etc directory in dozens of formats is still not as bad as the big registry pig.

While speed, funct

Re:Wall building?

[Stamen]

It is true, that there should be different options for different people, I'd hate a world where only OS X or Linux existed. Ideally, a few major players would exist that had equal market share; this would be good for everyone as it fosters competition (like what happened when Firefox started to takeoff, people who like IE enjoyed Microsoft's renewed interest in adding new features to it).

But really, Microsoft guys are safe in not ever needing to cross over. I have a few problems with this:

* One is I started out as Microsoft developer, some VB, but mostly Visual C++. I also worked at a company that did a lot of FoxPro and some Visual J. You're to young to remember this, as you're just starting out, but the problem with knowing non-standard technologies, is they can and will be taken away from you. I mentioned FoxPro and Visual J, because those were, and those developers were left high and dry. Heck, I know plenty of VB developers that complain bitterly about Microsoft dropping them (and no, VB.NET isn't VB, other than in appearance). VB was one of the most popular languages, and Microsoft just dropped it. Once you've been around for a while, you see this happen time and time again; your .net knowlege, in the future, will be just as useful as FoxPro knowlege is now. Sure c# is a standard, but it won't matter when Microsoft decides to switch to Foo++ language and none of their tools support c# anymore.

* The other problem I have is that the world is far from black and white. And even all Microsoft shops will have 3rd party tools come into their domain and they will have to work with them. Plus companies need to work with other companies, and you can't control what they will have. You WILL be exposed to non-Microsoft technology, and your boss WILL expect you to make it work, NOW. After years and years of this, you start to change your mind about what you should be learning.

Microsoft can make excellent tools that support industry and de-facto standards. And they would be very good at this, and they would make lots of money. But they refuse too, because "lots of money" isn't "all the money", and thus isn't good enough for them. I supported them for a long, long time; but like an abusive father, one day you start to punch back, and then you leave; because you realize, it's just not worth it anymore.

I use Server 2003 on a laptop. ^_^

[Ayanami Rei]

Bluetooth, dock/undock, hibernate, gaming, it all works. And IE is completely declawed so you don't even if you accidentally open an untrusted URL in it, you're not going to get adware toolbars installed and your NDIS stack rejiggered.

Microsoft just doesn't get it

[jackspenn]

How hard would it be to have the following items added to Windows 2008:

1). SSH Server (so I can remote into my machine over a slow connection or my blackberry)
2). A decent shell (powershell has a lot of potention, if they added powershell support for all management feature s in Windows and AD like they did for Exchange 2007, that would be awesome).

I love parts of Linux and I love parts of Windows and I just wonder why there is nothing that puts the good from both together.

Re:server w/out ssh? How much obtuse can you get?

[Bert64]

SSH is invaluable because of the flexibility it offers, flexibility you don't have on windows by default, and don't have to the same level if you install cygwin with ssh...

RDP is more responsive than plain X, but it's also 10+ years newer, try comparing to NX and it's a whole different story.

Also, SSH is more responsive than RDP or X if all your using it for is as an interactive terminal. Where SSH really shines is the ability to pipe commands and data back and forth, which you simply cannot do with RDP.

SSH

[Almahtar]

Mod me down, whatever... I can't believe how many well worded and legitimate complaints about the lack of SSH support got modded troll. We're talking about lack of both an SSH client and server. These are basic tools for an admin using most servers. I'm really surprised that even on /. a person saying "Come on, no SSH?" would get modded troll. That's a legitimate complaint. SSH is essential to my operation. If I bought ANY server OS that didn't support it out of the box I would seriously question its credibility.