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Sneak Peek at Windows Server 2008
stinkymountain writes to tell us that NetworkWorld got their hands on Microsoft's latest addition to the server OS market and had a chance to poke around inside Windows Server 2008. It seems that the new release is a vast improvement over older versions in both security and performance but still lacking in several key areas. "There's even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It's otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There's no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It's also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures."
Do you think Windows Server Core will run on embedded hardware? That seems like the best place for something like this.
These are all great ideas but I would've liked to have seen them a decade or more ago.
Even so, better late than never.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
so you add or remove / trun it on or off at any time with out havening to reinstall widnows server.
anybody know?
Oh wait, too late.
Um... how about "insightful" instead???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
(yes, I know that some Windows admins can use a CLI for nearly anything that'll run on one, but I'm almost willing to wager that the majority do not).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Number two being that it most likely still relies on that crap Registry schema for all of its settings.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You must have a ridiculously shitty car.
All while being naked to the world.
I don't know where you work, but at my job I don't have that nudity clause. In fact I'm pretty sure if I turned up to work naked I'd be fired. That's okay though because I'd rather quit than be around some of my coworkers naked.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Also, here's a video interview with the Vista kernel team on the topic of the Windows Registry among other things, and why it has remained.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Btw, the "registry as a file system" (similar to the architecture Linux uses for all sorts of abstract "devices") is a documented API one can write own "providers" for.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'd think that if Linux is "lambasted" for being geeky it's because users need to do certain things with it, whereas most Windows users rarely ever open a console window.
The number of things that you need to do with bash on any Linux distro have decidedly decreased in the past few years, so I doubt the label is really applicable anymore. Perhaps the problem is that a lot of the problem-solving advice you can find online for distros like Ubuntu tend to use command line solutions, which is predictable if those solutions are being provided by more knowledgeable people who don't have a problem using the console to begin with.
I played with some of the early betas and Server 2008 is actually quite cool. The fact that most everything is now scriptable (the subset that wasn't before through WMI, at least, or the things that have been simplified) is a life saver, and the switching of server roles is very useful when you want to re-task a box quickly for whatever reason. Hosting companies will probably love it.
I think the important thing about 2008 is that it gives you the option to use a character-based environment, and it gives you a very good one at that (PowerShell). If you feel more comfortable with the GUI tools, they're all still there.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Someone should let Bill know about this.
and this: Gates predicts fall of the keyboardfrom: Gates: Keyboard use will decline
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The number of people who successfully ran outward-facing Solaris servers for any number of years would disagree with that.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
But I must say it seems you put the bar quite high!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I mean, at least with scattered .conf files, if one goes corrupt, so what? You only lose (some or all of) the one daemon that relies on it, while still being able to access the running server to fix it. The sole exception is grub.conf @ boot time, which (as saving grace if the conf file should go corrupt) can be edited and modified right there at the boot prompt. OTOH, if the Registry goes splat, you're not guaranteed much of anything depending on severity, meaning downtime to restore it at best, and a server rebuild/restoration at worst.
Not that I hate it per se, but I seriously believe it to be a huge potential liability in a standard production environment, let alone an HA/critical one.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They're really pushing the command-line thing for all their products. We got a demo of Exchange 2007 and not everything is configurable from within the GUI. Where it is, it gives you the PowerShell command at the bottom.
The worst part for me is that they're reducing support for a lot of their "old" API and everything has to be rewritten using command line tools. Essentially what I'm doing is making pretty web interfaces for something that should be part of their own product. Madness!
Lucky for you then, huh? ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Stripped down version, command line only.... Sounds like...
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
Give them another 5 - 10 years, and maybe, just maybe, they'll get there.
Get your own free personal location tracker
When has Microsoft ever opted to follow a industry standard rather than use their own?
Well... Besides TCP/IP... Though if it were up to them we'd be using NetBEUI for internet today.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Most people seem to miss the fact that it's not JUST a CLI, there are also a whole boatload of client GUI utilities that go with it, that you run on your workstation to manage the server. That's something that Linux has been largely missing (not counting stuff like Webmin, which isn't quite the same thing or remote X)
For example, for a Server Core Active Directory Role, you can administer it from the standard AD Users and Computers applet from any client.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I think the important thing about 2008 is that it gives you the option to use a character-based environment, and it gives you a very good one at that (PowerShell). If you feel more comfortable with the GUI tools, they're all still there.
How sad indeed that Powershell will not run on Server Core. Neither (as far as I've seen) will IIS or SQL. I would love to see a DB Server as close to bare hardware as possible for performance reasons! But really, no PowerShell on their brand new Server SKU? That is just stupid.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Windows core server sounds a lot like Unix, only without the 25+ year history and renowned stability record... why did we need this again? /supposed to be funny, but headache causing tumors in funny region
stuff |
You don't need to tell me about the downfalls of the windows registry. I got to live it, yet again, the other week when I upgraded my motherboard and had to reinstall windows (why is there no option to tell windows to 'redetect hardware' instead of loading an incorrect SATA driver and immediately BSODing?).
.ini files in their respective directories, this wouldn't have been a problem. It would also allow me to:
So, as usual, many of the applications and games I had installed that decided to store all their settings in the registry had a fit when I tried to run them. Had they used
1. Move the app/game to somewhere else on the system without needing to reinstall.
2. Back up the entire program, including it's settings.
3. Move the program to another system by just copying it.
I hate the registry. It should be for the OS only, and read-only for applications.
is something like core server with cheaper licensing. One area where linux kills windows right now are on clusters, where you have numerous relatively cheap boxes doing lots of raw computation.
Using windows for this you get a lot of overhead both in terms of cost, wasted HD space, memory, and processor usage on software and services that are irrelevant to a headless cluster node. Windows would be a lot more compelling for this space if they offered some kind of really cheap volume license for a stripped down windows that came utilities for managing a cluster of them. Some kind of logarithmic pricing model for clusters would be nice and make them a lot more competitive.
Of course I'm sure a lot of Linux enthusiasts would like to see Microsoft continue to price themselves out of the market. Personally, I think some more serious competition from windows on this front would be a good thing and spawn more innovation in the distributed computing space.
Because anecdotal evidence represents the pinnacle in accuracy and reliability, I offer my own experiences with the Windows registry.
I've experienced two registry corruptions - one was on Windows 98, and got eaten by the only virus I've ever suffered through.
The second one was on my grandfather's XP computer - the machine booted to the Welcome screen despite having only one user account, but there were no pretty pictures to click on. So, I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL (everyone's favorite key combination!) to get the old NT login screen, and find his username already filled in for me. Hitting OK gave me a "user not found" message.
I rebooted, and it bluescreened before launching the shell, saying that the registry hive was corrupted.
Crappy registry? Maybe, but chkdsk from the XP CD found that the hard disk had failed. >75% bad clusters, and the rest going, I'm sure.
So, I wouldn't worry too much about the registry. It's been there since Windows 95, and it even mostly functioned through a catastrophic disk failure. Besides, Windows keeps backup hives, and System Restore backs it up. Worst case, you're looking at a few minutes on the recovery console.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Yeah thats often the problem.
;)
Windows can BSOD just by having some hardware in the same room as it.
Another turn of Bob Barker's The Price is Right Wheel o Windows is a waste of effort unless it leaps ahead into outerspace in relation to the current feature set.
It has to run virtualization out of the box. It has to allow for per process and per CPU throttling. It has to run real time back up, support dedicated inline encryption and security subsystems. It has to support 16x more RAM and an order of magnitude larger AD spaces. It has to support virtualized patches, a journalled file system, a file system that spans physical volumes.
THAT's what solid improvement looks like, not fixing 70% of what they left out or broke before and calling that a new version.
I've been playing with this at work, and for a "trimmed down CLI" version of the OS I find it telling that it uses just 60 mb of memory after booting than the GUI version and it still requires some 3.5 gb of hard drive space (this isn't precise, I'm not at work right now). And the weirdest thing about it is that it's not just command line. It actually loads, to a point, the windows GUI. There's no explorer, but the command line box it gives you is a window. You can move it with the mouse. You can open notepad, and it opens in a window. Regedit is still there. Just to see if I could, I installed Firefox. They leave out a few handy odds and ends like Explorer.exe so you don't get your usual file manager, but if they're serious about going with a real command line, this ain't it.
Maybe it does have it's place. If you just want to run basic DNS or some of the 10 or so other things it's intended to do, then at least it's going to do that for you with slightly less memory/space requirements and without quite so much other stuff running that leaves it so open to other vulnerabilities. But I still find it kind of silly, a good Sys. Admin can lock down the regular GUI version just fine and resource savings are so minimal as to be nonexistent.
But that's just my couple of cents...
Do you know of a remote code vulnerability in the default install of IIS6? I know of one in the default install and a handful with ASP turned on. Since IIS6 is 5 years old I would say that's pretty damn good, even having the source to Apache isn't going to get you much better security than that since it's programmed by humans and is a non-trivial application.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
XML is such a terse language, really - ignore what some people say, but it's not meant for humans.
Sure, you can read it but writing it using a normal text editor is a boring, error-prone job that will drive any admin nuts if they are forced to do enough of it.
Why not be _really_ innovative and provide a shell to manipulate XML files based on the schema.
I feel OpenVMS needs to die. Considering the only actively maintained processor architecture for it is now Itanium, it's a great day for it to die.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's because it's a lot easier to tell a quesion-asker to run
than to walk them through "open the control panel, click 'Sound Themes' then 'Color Editor', go to the 'Remote Widgets and Printing' tab, look for the 'Allow Zebras' checkbox, uncheck it, click apply, re-check it, click apply again, then close the window." Plus, users get it in their shell history so they can run it again without bookmarking the forum page and stepping through the instructions again.
Command line interfaces aren't just "lower level". They allow a different kind of expressivness which lends itself very well to certain tasks. Routine administration is very often that sweet spot.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I do have to say that I'm amused at the idea of a GUI-less Windows, considering that Windows began as nothing but a GUI, which ran on top of DOS. After all the effort Microsoft went through to make the GUI mandatory and supposedly integral to the OS itself, now they're talking about uncoupling it. MS-DOS 8.0 anyone?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
In my opinion the best way to illustrate the weakness of the MS registry design is to illustrate one of it's strengths at the same time. Run regmon.exe to monitor registry activity and then open folder. I just did this on one of my workstations. With no windowed apps open and limited non-XP services running, opening a folder triggered ~2900 registry actions(OpenKey, QueryValue, SetValue, CloseKey) On one hand, this is amazing. Those 2900 registry actions must be extremely efficient, as it doesn't take but a second for that folder to open. On the other hand, this IMO is part of why Windows performance always degrades over time in non-static workstation configs. The number of keys being queried from has linear growth over time, so those 2900 actions will get slower and slower as the registry grows.
I just don't see how it could be deemed efficient for a basic desktop app to query a registry of hundreds of thousands(millions?) of keys/values to decide if my background should be blue or green.
I agree - their readable and writable by humans, but often very verbose, and if dealing with a large number of different xml files from different projects (e.g. Spring, EJB, app server configs and other random Java stuff) then its hard to remember all the different options and their expectations.
:)
:)
What I was proposing is a commandline editor similar to 'ed' but specifically for XML files with auto-hinting and validation based on the schema/dtd files.
In the end you'd probably have something quite similar to the Cisco IOS console, but it would work on any xml file, and more significantly make my life easier
Take a look at programs like OxygenXML - specialist XML editors, then think about how these could be applied to commandline editing