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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.'"
It needs all that memory for the new Windows Server Aero features!
Without SSH and SFTP, does it seem as if Microsoft is trying to build a wall between itself and Linux? To what end I'm not sure, but this is starting to seem deliberate.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
> "and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'."
19 pages - more pages to serve adverts. A few paragraphs on each page, and on "print" so you can't just read the whole thing in one page.
Come off it - take away the pictures, and the whole articles is a couple of paragraphs. In-depth? For people who never read anything harder than a comic book, maybe.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Windows Server 2008 takes up 10 GB of hard drive space.
10?! What the hell's taking up all the space?!
Perhaps there's a 1080p movie of Balmer chanting "Developers Developers Developers"
Summation 2
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
That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
"That would mean that a two-processor (=socket) license would allow the use of up to eight cores with current processors!"
How generous of Microsoft!
It does however make me wonder if my graphics card was pushing the speed of the interface, how am I going to justify to my department head that I need the latest gaming card for my server? I have been trying that excuse for years to no avail :)
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Now it is a problem if MS is not bundling software? Last time I checked, that was a good thing. At least it allows excellent third party products such as putty and pscp to thrive.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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?
Oh please. If you work remotely, you can use Remote Desktop. Its encrypted. Ssh isn't the end all be all of server products, and not having it hardly qualifies as "crippling" an OS.
Printable view -- http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/25/windows_server_2008_reviewed/print.html No ads either :P
That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.
It looks like Microsoft has already put Windows on the Atkins diet!
By 2010 Windows will either suffer a heart attack, or it will be nice and svelte!
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.
The Microsoft philosophy is that you'd use Remote Desktop/Terminal Services to log in to do any administration task you need. I don't see it as inferior to SSH, just a different way of doing things. (And it's definitely a hell of a lot faster than the Unix equivalent SSH+VNC.)
Comment of the year
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.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Actually, it may be launched in 2007 even. SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 are "officially" launched in 2008, but will be RTM (and will be able to be purchased through regular means) at the end of 2007, and it was hinted Server 2008 may do the same.
...becoause everyone is different and special in their own way!
.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.
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
I'd send MS to the corner for its lousy behaviour.
This link explains at a very high level why there is no SFTP out of the box, but it is a downloadable option.
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.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
As I spent the last week trying to untangle the mess of manifests, I realized one thing. Vista is NOT all crap.
:).
UI popup asking you to verify that you clicked something is not that great. But if you get a virus, you may stop and wander why you get popoup boxes all the time even if you didn't click it. Annoying but maybe effective? Don't know. This is the part of Vista I do not like at all.
manifest files - ughh! Well, if you understand them, they are not that bad. Still annoying to the developers but better than DLL Hell of yesteryears. If you want a different confusion for developers, look at OS X frameworks. Not exactly standard dynamic libraries there either.
The new folder locations are great. Vista is getting closer to what Linux/Unix had for years. Actually, they are easier to understand than Mac OS X stuff.
The real pain are the 64-bit/32-bit file/registry reflections. That is just stupid. Same application = Same key! The lack of manifest = registry reflection is also crap. Open a registry, and it opens a different one for you! Stupid!!
But the changes in Vista are not all bad. There are some good ones. (BTW, manifests and SxS execution was in place since XP or 2000, just no one used it until Vista is forcing it down our throats
Of course, I still find Gnome+Linux the most productive environment over Vista or XP or OS X. It just works.
PS. 2003 is not faster than XP. It will only be faster if you install crap on your XP box. What 2003 has is more throughput = less overhead. But that also means less interactivity. And people will not "transition" from XP -> 2008. If they do, then they have too much money in their pockets.
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.
Respect the Constitution
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.
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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.