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Windows Server 8 Is A Radical Departure From Previous Releases
Julie188 writes "While the world is distracted with the Window 8 client, Microsoft is simultaneously working on Windows Server 8. At BUILD, Microsoft unveiled its next-generation server OS under heavy secrecy to a room full of analysts and product testers. WS8 is radically different than its predecessors. There's an argument to make that it's not actually Windows. The code they saw was pre-beta and an obvious attempt to put an arrow in the heart of former-softie-turned-VMware-CEO Paul Maritz. Windows 8 Server editions are to be run in Server Core format (the GUI will be optional). PowerShell has gotten an overhaul and its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets in Windows Server 8. Hyper-V has also been revamped and will become massively scalable in the number of VMs supported and in the size of each VM."
In related news, it appears that Java now runs on Microsoft's Azure platform.
Not surprised that Java runs on Azure now. Even iCloud uses Azure for their backend.
This space for rent.
Windows is not done if it doesn't have Edlin, the world's greatest text editor.
Microsoft isn't saying anything about linux, however this is a direct attack against linux and unix in general
Its real competition, not "an attack". This is a good thing.
These just sound like incremental improvements. I'm not complaining but adding extra commandlets and features isn't a "radical departure". Plus, the GUI is optional on the current version of Windows Server.
Actually, it seems like Microsoft sees VMware as its actual competition.
C'mon, Bill, do you really expect us to fall for that AGAIN?
(Of course, some will... I'm depressed now...)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
PowerShell is much more powerful than bash. Bash is pretty much just running linux commands with a few logical structures built-in. PowerShell is a lot more like an actual programming language, with real objects, functions and data handling.
Agreed on the BASH part. FTA: "[Powershell is] literally an OS itself. You can do anything in it," In other words, MS is saying, "Look at what we have! a command prompt you can administrate the computer through!" How non exciting when the same thing has been available in Linux/other OSes for a long, long time.
On Slashdot, competing with Linux is an "attack" and makes you evil.
Integration of MS products with MS products is not a reason to call something great. This applies if you replace MS with any other corporation.
A products move from good to great is strongly based on its coupling and cohesion with other solutions. This is true for a software package, a hardware package, or a process. For example, Google Apps and Picassa have very little to no coupling and cohesion. Visual Studio and Azure have a very functional level of coupling and cohesion. Each is greater than the sum of their parts.
*hands the troll a bone*
Windows has been perfectly intuitive for me. Moreso than MacOS. I found Ubuntu and FreeBSD more intuitive than MacOS, sadly. Admittedly with FreeBSD, I had someone point me to the handbook first thing. What is "most intuitive" very much depends on the user.
Oh, and I didn't need to install cards for printers on any of them. Usually I don't even need to download drivers separately (unless you count installing CUPS in FreeBSD).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I just don't understand why Microsoft can't just make a good BASH variant for Windows, so us folks who administrate heterogeneous networks can create a common stock of admin scripts, and a common scripting language to do them in. Microsoft still can't get over the fact that it isn't the only boy in town in the server world, and making proper integration tools, as opposed to trying to force itself on us at every turn, should take precedence.
Yes, I know there's Cygwin, but it's huge and a major pain in the ass and I consider the ugliest of hacks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Personally, I think PowerShell is a lot closer to the ideal shell for today than Bash is (and I'm typing this on Linux). PS is kind of maddening to use because of some things like the tab completion differences (I've tried to give it a fair shot, but I really don't like it) and the god-awful "terminal emulator" that it runs in.
But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.
(I'm open to some textual serialization of objects, such as JSON or similar.)
Someone in Redmond realized that a server doesn't necessarily need a GUI???
VMS -> WNT -> W2K -> W2003 -> W2008 -> VMS.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And if they do tthat....why bother with windows, when there are more mature Unix type OSes out there?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So you are bashing PowerShell for allowing you to do more than what you need with it? Seriously? You don't need to use those extra features if you don't want to, but for anyone actually doing some work it's a great tool (you know, for those that actually do something else than play around with their wardrobe servers).
I don't think you have even used PowerShell, you just want to hate on it because it's Windows-based and that "ooh Windows admins must be stupid!" line makes it even more visible. The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers, and is usually much better choice for certain things than Linux based server, especially in corporate environments. Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.
.
"The world"? Probably the funniest thing I read all day.
Why you blame Microsoft for it? What about we turn it around and ask why can't Linux folks just make a good PowerShell variant for Linux distros?
And yet, for all of that, the SH-variants have an enormous body of code behind them. I'm willing to concede there are aspects of Powershell that might be desirable, but it's a fucking nightmare to code in, and for scripting, I don't really want to code anyways. The whole point behind sh and all its children wasn't so that you could have some full blown programming language, but rather that you could automate tasks, and at that, the sh family works remarkably well, and has done so for decades.
I have no problem with choice, but I would love it if a properly integrated bash variant was available on Windows. Not one that requires some awful layer like Cygwin, but one that runs natively without some ghastly compatibility layer.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Will it still be able to be converted to a workstation OS like server2008 and R2, and, as a workstation, will it be a more seamless transition for users from Windows 7 than 8 proper?
Where have I heard of this before? Lets see... A server OS that has the option to be command line only and has in exceed of 2,300 command line functions.... Oh yeah... Unix/Linux.
I'm glad PowerShell is getting an upgrade. It's already very good, but little tweaks can easily make it much better.
Coz if they did MS would sue, sue and sue again.
Anyway, what's wrong with bash then?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Is there some reason that PowerScript is needed on *nix, which has a tool set far beyond anything Microsoft has ever produced.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.
The real world uses Linux and other Unix variants. While Windows may be fine for print servers and other non-critical business functions, no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked.
And with that Windows catches up with the late 70's. :P
#6495ED - cornflower blue
its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets
Holy fuck. I don't even know how to process that number of commands to remember.
And yet, for all of that, the SH-variants have an enormous body of code behind them
And yet, Windows has lots of legacy apps despite it being in many ways inferior to *nixs. (I believe in the last bit of that rather less than your typical /.er.) Popularity isn't particularly good evidence of not being sucky.
it's a fucking nightmare to code in
As opposed to sh? ...but rather that you could automate tasks, and at that, the sh family works remarkably well, and has done so for decades
And a more PS-like shell could do it far better in many cases.
(Okay, in some sense I'm lumping way too much in with the shell, and am considering the common utilities like ls in there too. Really, a new suite of utilities without a new shell could do more than a new shell with the same old utilities.)
I would love it if a properly integrated bash variant was available on Windows. Not one that requires some awful layer like Cygwin, but one that runs natively without some ghastly compatibility layer.
Now I actually agree with you there.
But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.
The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?
Palm trees and 8
Exactly. Powershell is not a replacement for bash, but for perl, python, or whatever other scripting language you like. Bash is a UI with some programming features thrown in to make it more powerful. Powershell is a programming language with some UI features thrown in as an afterthought.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's only a nightmare to you because you are familiar with bash etc and you are not familiar with PS.
I still don't understand why you are hating PS for having more functionality that you need. If it didn't do some particular task, then you'd be all over it for being incomplete or lacking or not up to production standards, but now it does everything you need and more and you still find something to complain about?
Your problem is simply that PS is not BASH, not that PS sucks in any way, but because all you know is BASH, PS therefore sucks. You've made about half a dozen comments in this thread moaning about how PS is not BASH, and how Windows should rather include BASH instead of PS, and how PS is pointless and garbage because it's not BASH.
And then you paradoxically say you have no problem with choice, as long as the choice is BASH.
I think the problem is actually with you.
The problem is the complexity, dumping users, especially windows users who have little or no CLI experience into a powerful environment like powershell is not a good approach.. Especially when it's something completely new, rather than a logical extension of something users will already have been familiar with.
Bash is simple yet flexible, and builds on the bourne shell which has been around for many years... You don't need to learn anything new in order to get on with it, and bash is very good for the majority of people's tasks.
For the small subset of people who need something more powerful, there are a large number of existing scripting or full on programming languages available.
The same can be said of ACLs, windows only provides acls while unix provides both acls and regular unix permissions... Windows also provides different APIs for adjusting registry and driver ACLs, while unix uses the same filesystem APIs for both.
Unix permissions are less flexible, but provide everything that 99% of users require. The complexity of windows ACLs and the multiple different APIs for setting permissions in different places however discourage people from using them, so you get lots of users with weak permissions on their files, device drivers with weak permissions and programs that set poor permissions on their installation files or configuration.
You need simple but flexible for 99% of users by default, and an optional more powerful system for the 1% who need it.
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Sorry, I forgot to check the user ID before I posted. If I'd realised it was him I'd have ignored it.
The biggest problem is that you often need to parse (and reparse, and reparse...) data because.... it's in a textual format. Most of the time it's easy parsing, like extracting a column, but it's still obnoxious. ("Does it start at column 40? No? 45? No? How' bout 43?" Or you write a "ruler" script.)
Parsing file names in particular is... "interesting". It's basically never worth it to get it actually correct, which should tell you that something in the toolchain is doing it wrong.
It might come in handy, I suppose, in processing XML-based configs, but those still make a pretty small chunk of all the conf files in existence. For any heavy duty processing like that you always have awk or Perl if you want a full-blown language. Heck, I remember writing a ten or fifteen line awk script that processed some weirdo mainframe style inventory list of about 100,000 items into a csv file using awk.
The issue here, I think, is that *nix doesn't really use objects at all for base OS interaction. That's a Windows thing. So maybe Powershell really is a Windows necessity, though, as I said, even in my Windows scripting, I can't really think of any occasions where I need it desperately. At the end of the day, the underlying Windows configuration system still is largely name-value pairs, no matter how much OOP veneer Microsoft chooses to put on top of it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS. VMWare made it easier for shops to run more MS servers by combining them.
Besides how long is it going to take MS to release the next server OS with the features they are advertising?
I hope in the long run they do VMs like they do Terminal Servers. MS isn't putting Citrix out of business by providing some basic TS capabilities built into the product. If you need more then what MS provides then you go to a vendor that goes beyond the basics. Citrix for TS and VMWare for VMs.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/bash/
You're welcome.
Oh, what's that? You mean you really wanted Bash + the entire toolchain? And also the same OS conventions and the same security model?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I'm not saying get rid of powershell, I'm saying put a native variant of a shell scripting language that has been around for longer than Bill Gates has been in the computer industry. That way, there is a proper choice.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Probably because sh-derivatives like bash are common on more operating systems that GNU/Linux, and because bash itself is frequently used on other Unix-like OSes. It is also the case that bash has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of bash scripts that IT guys have lying around that they would love to use on Windows.
Palm trees and 8
Thanks for that link to an unmaintained build whose latest file is from 2000.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm just flabbergasted by 2300 "commandlets" in PowerShell... they couldn't abstract and simplify the system enough to reduce that?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You don't need to learn anything new in order to get on with it
Uh, if you already know it.
while unix uses the same filesystem APIs for both.
Meanwhile chmod modifies traditional Unix permissions, while acl_* functions modify the ACLs. From the user's perspective, chmod and ls -l is used for traditional permissions, but setfacl and getfacl are used for ACLs. I'm not sure why you're trying to argue that Unix is consistent on this matter...
Unix permissions are less flexible, but provide everything that 99% of users require.
Whereas if they don't, you're totally screwed. Want to share a file with just one or two other people, but don't have root (to create a group)? Have fun with traditional Unix permissions.
(In undergrad, when I worked on a group project, our security was "gee, I hope no one guesses the name of this directory.")
That you Baghdad Bob? We love you!
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
So grab the source and build it yourself, instead of whining that somebody else, especially Microsoft of all entities, isn't porting it for you.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
If you're using any OS permissions system just to set up access for one or two users, then you're doing it wrong. I've literally seen guys who have set up server shares where folders and files have permissions for individual users.
Oh, and we've had POSIX ACLs for how long now?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Does it start at column 40? No? 45? No? How' bout 43?"
What exactly have you been doing with your shell? I have never had anything that approaches this sort of problem; on a few occasions I wind up forgetting which of a handful of columns from the output of "ps" or "ls -l" is the one I want to sort by. Even if you wind up having dozens of columns, I fail to see how object oriented programming is going to help you, since you are still stuck having to remember dozens of fields for whatever class you are dealing with.
Parsing file names in particular is... "interesting". It's basically never worth it to get it actually correct,
Do you have an actual example that you could share? Again, this is a problem that I have never encountered, and I have been using GNU for a long time.
Palm trees and 8
I'll believe it when these functions quit working. The whole thing is still heavily based on the windows message pump and a HUGE legacy C API that does everything under the windows hood. On top of that there's a COM layer and on top of those there's now a .NET layer. But the foundation is still the same 9 gazillion C calls and WM_ messages.
Yes, it took them 9 years to copy Apple's awesome server. I mean I don't even know a single person or business that doesn't think of Apple, when they think server. Thankfully when Jobs came back he said "we're going to focus on servers and stick it to Microsoft."
So why do you assume I'm some Linux geek who runs a home network in his basement? I've been in this business for over 20 years, and have set up and administered networks all the way to LANManager-based networks running Lantastic and Windows for Workgroups, as well as Xenix, FreeBSD and Linux systems, not to mention NT 3.51/4/Windows 2000/Server 2003/Server 2008, along with Exchange 95/2003/2007, and currently have a network with eight servers divided between six locations, with AD domains and in particular using site-based GPOs.
You have this bizarre idea about *nix and its users that does not resemble reality at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Crap, I using *nix variants like Xenix that didn't even have the GNU toolset, and was based on older variants, and I've never had that problem. I've done a LOT of text processing under various *nix variants, and to be honest with you, I've actually dropped Windows compiles of tools like awk, sed and Perl into my servers just to get the level of processing power those tools can provide.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm still trying to figure out what good it would do. Powershell, like its antecedents (WMI, Vbscript, etc.) is accessing exposed elements of the Windows API and various APIs for other systems like Active Directory and Exchange. *nix has never had those particular problems, because it's always stuck to a minimalistic approach.
I'm still waiting for someone to point out what advantage a powershell-like shell would do in a *nix system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Extensibility. By using objects, you don't have to worry about forward and backward breakage to nearly the same degree. Reflection is also a big win.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Worse than that: They're copying OS/2, which they helped write. (OS/2 could boot to a non-GUI text console for servers and ATMs.)
Heck, they're copying one of their own SAFE MODE boots.
Or maybe, They're copying DOS.
... by turning a PC into an oversized, user-unfriendly smart phone.
The company I work for doesn't think of Apple. We run FreeBSD and more recently Centos on our servers. Though maybe that's just because our CEO is a UNIX fan...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
MS has put a lot of effort into developer productivity in Windows 8, especially when crossing boundaries between the client, server, and cloud. Visual Studio is now buttressed with a new version of Expression Blend that edits both HTML5 and XAML. The editor has a live preview that lets you navigate a site with an inboard browser, then dive into the code on a single rendered element, even if it is dynamically generated. Likewise, there are new remote debugging tools that lets the developer go from a running web app to the output of the server to the code that generates the output, all in one view. There are single-click deployment tools for publishing to server, app store, and cloud.
This all goes /way/ beyond what Eclipse can do. Very impressive; tooling has always been a strength for MS.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Because bash and by extension the bourne shell came first, and has already been the standard on pretty much every OS except windows. There are already a large number of people familiar with it, and a large number of already written scripts for it.
That's like me creating a non standard power socket carrying a non standard voltage, and then demanding that you install it in your house and replace all the existing appliances you have.
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No I'm not a Microsoft employee.
Yes, you are. If you are not Microsoft employee, you work for some astroturfer-for-hire outfit that works for Microsoft.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"Best tool for the job" assumes infinite budgets to pay for it. I'd probably be less allergic to Windows if I had unlimited budgets, but I don't, and worse, even if I got a big budget to move a bunch of the stuff I do now over to Windows, in five or six years when Microsoft is clearly pushing for upgrades, I get to spend that all over again.
Our main file server is running Samba. Not because Samba's better than Windows. In a lot of ways, it's a big pain in the ass, and Posix ACL mapping to Windows ACLs is pretty imperfect at the best of times. But I can upgrade to the next version of Samba for the cost of my time, and not have to try to eek out a huge budget to buy a new operating system that will likely require new hardware, and will come waited with a whole bunch of CALs. As I said, I run a very mixed network.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Can you give us an example of where you would need this in a *nix environment. Something specific here.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
50% is a made up number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
You won't find 50% here for MS, except the revenue counting channel, which doesn't count OS' properly that you don't have to buy.
Because bash and by extension the bourne shell came first, and has already been the standard on pretty much every OS except windows. There are already a large number of people familiar with it, and a large number of already written scripts for it.
Well, FORTRAN was also created before C, and has been a standard for a long time before C appeared. But, sometimes there really is a better way to do things.
In any case, if you want bash on Windows, it has been available for ages in MSYS or Cygwin. Portable scripts will still be a chore because of e.g. filesystem differences, though.
What exactly have you been doing with your shell? I have never had anything that approaches this sort of problem; on a few occasions I wind up forgetting which of a handful of columns from the output of "ps" or "ls -l" is the one I want to sort by.
Hmm, some examples looking back through my history:
I've got things like:
I sort of feel like "replace cut" is a typical example of this, but it's not the only one. I'm not sure what else to look for in my history though.
you are still stuck having to remember dozens of fields for whatever class you are dealing with.
Which is easier? Remembering "the PID is in the column named
" or remembering "the PID is in columns 10-15. Oh, unless the width of the first column depends on the maximum username length being displayed, in which case it might change."
And even if you forget, you could run ps and it would tell you, as opposed to you having to count fields.
Do you have an actual example that you could share? Again, this is a problem that I have never encountered, and I have been using GNU for a long time.
If you want a full discussion of the problems you can face, see here. (My executive summary is that "if you've used xargs, you've probably used something that is broken -- or at least not general.")
And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS
Because MS makes money on licensing OS shipped pre-installed on machines. New servers are so powerful that partitioning makes sense, and VMWare is now an alternative OS to Windows Server when you order a new server. VMWare is actually a customized Linux + virtualization tools. The tools & services shipped with with VMWare have started exceeding the classic definition of VM host, they now have partitioned Java containers running directly on the host. In a short time, they'll have native VMWare business applications (DB, Web servers) running in soft partitions (jails) that don't require a guest OS to run, turning VMWare into a full fledged server OS. Which means no more Windows. Oops.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
> The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers
Yeah? where did you pull that number from?
> Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work
'some' real work? are you kidding me? You're right. Hobbyist stuff. The same hobbyist stuff that's been paying my bills for over 12 years now.
A true non gui environment would have a full screen cli interface in text mode (i.e. no unnecessary loading of video drivers)
Which would require the hardware to support a text mode. Not all video chipsets on all platforms do. But if only enough driver is loaded to support a terminal emulator, and the operating system still supports old-skool serial consoles, I agree with you.
> how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.
man ssh
specifically the part about "if command is specified, it is executed on the remote host instead of a login shell".
Your move, chief.
My top issue is that while PowerShell does a better-than-most job at having powerful capabilities *without* the syntactic burden of an equivalent language (like Python/Perl), it *still* (necessarily) compromises somewhat. The fancy piping sometimes has unanticipated oddness in certain scenarios (easiest example, do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations). In general, it's largely able to work due to MS implementing everything top-to-bottom, but I just don't see it scaling in the same way as Linux/Unix does with respect to third party development all co-existing in bourne shell.
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.
Just flamebait. Considering most public-facing servers are not microsoft, it's fairly silly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Their answer is doing all kinds of convoluted stuff in WS-MAN. They don't grasp the concept of simplicity.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you're using any OS permissions system just to set up access for one or two users, then you're doing it wrong. I've literally seen guys who have set up server shares where folders and files have permissions for individual users.
Um, so what exactly should I have done?
Oh, and we've had POSIX ACLs for how long now?
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that *nix is still deficient in this matter, just address the insinuation that because they aren't used all that much means they aren't important.
Coz if they did MS would sue, sue and sue again.
Pure FUD. The PowerShell specification was released under the Community Promise specifically so it could be implemented on other platforms.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
OMG ! You have EIGHT servers ! When "your" servers gets into the thousands then come back and post about enterprise software.
Their claims of performance enhancements seem promising and I think the Live Storage Migration feature could really come in handy.
Of course I won't jump on board right away, but it's definitely something I'll try to get a hold of to set up in a test environment.
Your chances of already knowing bourne shell, which has been around for many years are much higher than knowing powershell which is a lot newer, and not an extension of anything existing.
You have chmod for traditional permissions, and setfacl/getfacl for advanced permissions (ACLs), you can use these same commands/functions for files, configuration (which are also files) and device drivers (which have files in /dev).
On windows you only have advanced permissions, and no simple option. You then have a set of functions for filesystem permissions, a different set for registry permissions and another set for driver permissions.
If you don't think this is a problem, take a look at digit-labs.org where there are privilege escalation exploits for a number of vulnerabilities in windows drivers where the vulnerable function never needs to be called by an unprivileged user anyway.
If unix permissions don't provide what you need, then chances are your needs are quite advanced and you are in a tiny niche, in which case you can learn how to use ACLs because modern unixes have these too. For the other 99% of users you can use a simple system instead of being forced to learn a complex one.
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Apple server is horrible on the enterprise level, anyone who works in a data center will tell you that. The security and the features just are not there. Linux and Windows Servers are best suited for enterprise needs. Windows Server has had a a light weight version which boots into command line text called Server Core. I realize you are an Apple fan-boy and probably and probably never touched a server, but do some research before you post.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Windows has had a version of server called Server Core, where it boots into the command line only to save resources and minimize attack space. Quit being an ignorant fan boy and do some research.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Power shell can be good but..
I used PS scripts to build an 8 node cluster on 2008R2 Datacenter core for a HyperV project. It was interesting and the MS stuff was not hard to figure out and replicate. The problem was getting the other required vendor software and drivers properly installed and configured on the servers. We have HP servers connected to EMC SANs. The HP NIC teaming tools, Navisphere, Powerpath, our monitoring software etc.. was NOT as easy to get on there and configure without a GUI. Some just flat out had problems with no easy workaround. Vendors were not as "core server" aware as they should be. I've done a few more similar setups since and vendor support is getting better but don't be surprised if a few issues pop up with no immediate fix. Hopefully they are not show stoppers. On a side note, we have built more similar 8 node HyperV clusters and we did not use server core. In my opinion, this is the best of both worlds, you can still use your PS scripts for automation for the bulk of the setup and then use the GUI for the problem 3rd party support. Our HyperV clusters are not pushed to the limit so we don't notice any performance difference between core and the full GUI install.
And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS
They're doing something in the computer field and it's popular and not Microsoft. Look at the Zune - why did Microsoft need to be in the music player business? Only because Apple was and succeeding and they were jealous. How much time and energy did they waste on that?
Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates around to throw fits about stuff like this.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You have chmod for traditional permissions, and setfacl/getfacl for advanced permissions (ACLs), you can use these same commands/functions for files, configuration (which are also files) and device drivers (which have files in /dev). On windows you only have advanced permissions, and no simple option. You then have a set of functions for filesystem permissions, a different set for registry permissions and another set for driver permissions.
I agree that this is a problem, but at the same time, it's just inconsistency on a different axis.
If unix permissions don't provide what you need, then chances are your needs are quite advanced and you are in a tiny niche, in which case you can learn how to use ACLs because modern unixes have these too.
Maybe I'm biased because of my position in academia (as a grad student), but it seems to me that the need to be able to manage your own groups and use them for file system permissions is reasonably common (a-couple-times-a-semester common), and that this need is shared from undergrads through professors. Undergrads would need to do it more common, professors less (at least if you can assume that groups like "the members of my class" are administered formally).
May not be the common case overall, but I wouldn't exactly tall that a "tiny niche".
Why doesn't Apple take advantage of M$'s decision to go batshit stupid? If Apple marketed their desktop OS for PC's in general they could earn even more insane amounts of money. I know it would be difficult to support all the different configurations out there but still it just looks SO f'n tempting. They could even call the next Apple OS "Couching tiger, hidden bitch slap".
Your argument is literally "Powershell sucks compared to bash because it's more than I need."
Linux shells still pass data as text, when passing objects would make so much more sense and give a lot more options
Sorry, but no, passing data as objects sucks.
Text is the one and only universal interface. Passing data as objects limits you to one system. If you have powershell objects you need a powershell environment to use them.
When I want to get data from a website into my database text is the only format that both sides understand. Putting it into more general terms, when I want to get data from X to put it into Y text is the only format that both sides understand.
I can scan and OCR text from old books and newspapers. I can print text. I can edit text in any machine from a PDP-11 to a smart phone. When I'm limited to a slow and/or high latency connection text is the only format that works. I can use vi to edit a data file in a remote Unix system using a 300 bps modem if I need to. I can speak text on a phone for someone else to type it at the other end.
When I'm managing an important system that *must* keep running under emergency situations only text will do.
Object oriented system administration is bullshit.
easiest example, do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations
I don't really understand your example. You piped a binary object to cat - surely this is expected behavior? The only reason it seems unintuitive to you is that you don't expect ps to emit a binary object, right? Why would you ever pipe to cat in Powershell, anyways?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Well, for one, it would allow you to improve and add functionality to basic utilities like ls without adding dozens of options and/or breaking large numbers of script.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Those stupid people on kernel.org using IIS. No wonder they got hacked. Morons !!
As far as I'm aware, Kernel.org was hacked using compromised user credentials. Kind of hard to protect a server which lets users log in remotely if said users lose the credentials required to log in and don't even realise they did so.
Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates
Yes, Gates could be awfully thick about things. Fortunately, in such fluid times, MS is better able to go with the flow.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates around to throw fits about stuff like this.
No, just less competent. They still want to own everything, but can't produce a product that people prefer over the competition; the closest they've got is the Xbox, and that's swallowed billions that it has yet to pay back.
I think you have no idea of what the Unix shell does, you are just parroting M$ marketese.
Bash can pass objects from one module to the other, that's what the pipe is for. The Unix shell is perfectly compatible with any feature of any language that has a Unix version because it can run anything that runs on the system.
For example, you need some feature that Perl has but the shell lacks?
cat test.dat | perl -p -e "s/PowerShell is great/PowerShell is a piece of shit/g"
A shell language isn't meant to have everything plus the kitchen sink built in. The Unix shell runs on servers that may be embedded into a wide range of hardware, you shouldn't assume you'll have all the CPU, memory, and storage capacity to run an object oriented system with thousands of built-in commands.
There are a lot of not-sane admins out there. Some of them are our customers. *sigh*
I really doubt you're using the best tools for your jobs. You didn't even know that you can connect into UNIX machines remotely. You have no credibility in a discussion about servers or networking.
which is totally what she said
The point is in Unix, what you see is what you get. If ps did output binary, the user would see binary and an app downstream of a pipe would see binary. Since it outputs in text, the user sees text and a program would see text. In PowerShell, what you see has had some secret magic pre-applied, and thus things like 'awk '{print $4}' become meaningless (you get some selectors with more power, but not as open-ended). 'ps|cat' is a bit synthetic, but it is illustrative of the *sort* of issues that will crop up when you get fancier than the basics, but not wanting to step up to write your own cmdlets in a more sophisticated language. When you stray from the menu of MS pre-fabbed stuff, things get hairy fast. This is why the divide exists between structured languages (which are every bit as powerful as powershell) and shell scripting (which makes straightforward stuff simple, and doesn't particularly scale up beyond that). The former has capability at the expense of more complex syntax and the latter sacrifices capability for absolute transparency.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you want a full discussion of the problems you can face, see here. (My executive summary is that "if you've used xargs, you've probably used something that is broken -- or at least not general.")
Point taken -- I do actually remember an occasion where I accidentally created a file with a very strange name, and had to spend a few minutes coming up with a way to remove the file. The problem, though, is more relevant to allowable filenames than to shells -- as the article points out, simply forbidding files with malformed names would go a long way toward solving the problem, and there is no good reason for a filename to contain things like control characters or to have a hyphen as its first character.
I can grant this, though: having command instructions in a separate channel from input is a good idea. Although this filenames issue is not quite as bad as SQL injection, it is the same type of problem.
Palm trees and 8
But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.
The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?
Ok, how about:
Boss comes to you and says something like:
"Can you tell me what version of windows is running on all of our machines, and what service pack they are on?"
"...and can I have that as a CSV?"
You: .\report.csv
gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | export-csv
Boss: Actually, can I have that in html? I need to put that up in a web site
You: OK..here you go
gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | convertto-html > report.html
I find that you can do things in PS that are a pain in bash (e.g. get a list of processes started within the last hour)
Server Core, PowerShell . . . . Has anyone noticed how Windows has been looking more and more like Linux as of late?
Regards;
The point is in Unix, what you see is what you get. If ps did output binary, the user would see binary and an app downstream of a pipe would see binary.
Well, that's only sort of true. What about the programs that autodetect whether they are running on a terminal? Why is the output from ls different from ls | cat? You could easily have a situation where you run some command, look at the output, then pipe it into awk '{print $4}', and have it not do what you expect.
Granted, this in some sense a lot less extreme, but in another sense it's even worse. I can tell if the PS example is going to "malfunction" by looking at whether each command is a PowerShell command or not; you can only tell whether the ls | cat-like example is going to malfunction by looking at the code to ls (or by trying it).
(That being said, I tried ps | cat in the probably-old version of PowerShell I have installed on my laptop (2.0) and it basically crashed the console. I'd like to see more smarts here.)
My point was not that I never saw a table, it is that you are exaggerating when you claim that it is a matter of remember which of nearly 50 columns has the data one is looking for.
Oh, I see. No, when I said "column 50" I was referring to character column numbers, which you'd pass to cut -c##. I haven't had much luck with -f specifiers for typical output. Maybe I'm just stupid or something, but I can't figure out how to make it treat several spaces in a row (there so columns line up visually) as a single separator.
as the article points out, simply forbidding files with malformed names would go a long way toward solving the problem, and there is no good reason for a filename to contain things like control characters or to have a hyphen as its first character.
Sure, but a lot of present solutions even break if you have spaces in file names -- and prohibiting that is, in my strong opinion, neither desirable nor realistic.
I don't think anyone would argue that Powershell is a different paradigm, but I don't think it's that hard to understand. The only bit of "magic" is that whatever pops out the end of the pipe is formatted to text before being printed to the console. You don't need to do 'awk print $4}' when you can just do 'select-object name,description'. How is this less powerful or open-ended? That's what I'm not understanding. Especially because you can pipe the text output if you really want to with a .ToString().
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You really need to read this essay about filenames, as well as these two bits about parsing the outputs of ls and ps. In short: correct and secure work with filenames is made difficult by certain features of shells and their default configuration, and the output format of common tools (including ls) makes their output literally impossible to parse in a correct and secure manner. Parsing the output of ps is a very bad idea for similar reasons. It's fine if you're just doing one-liners for simple, everyday interactive work in the shell, but if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.
I've personally never used PowerShell. My solution to these difficulties has always been to learn to do things properly regardless of the difficulty. While I don't know enough about it to be convinced that it would be a proper solution, I can imagine many ways in which the idea of passing objects instead of text may make things easier. If you can't see why, you need to learn a lot more about shells and their issues. I'm not trying to be patronizing here or anything; it's just that shell scripting is a lot more complex than people typically realize, and such misconceptions cause security holes.
Sorry, but nothing microsoft does is a "good thing".
Even if they do something that seems good or even is short-term kinda nice, as soon as they can use it to strangle competition, they will.
If you get into bed with microsoft just because they have a van that says "candy" on it, you're going to wake up with a sore ass.
You can call me unfair, but I've seen it happen too many times to care, and I just can't listen to "I'll change baby! Promise!" any more.
No, when I said "column 50" I was referring to character column numbers, which you'd pass to cut -c##. I haven't had much luck with -f specifiers for typical output. Maybe I'm just stupid or something, but I can't figure out how to make it treat several spaces in a row (there so columns line up visually) as a single separator.
I usually just use awk here; I never did like cut much myself, and the amount of awk that one would need to use is pretty simple:
Which for example will print the 5th field of every input line. I am sure, however, that there will be cases where this will not do what you want e.g. if you need to change the delimiter or something to that effect (awk has a field separator variable and a record separator variable that can be used to control this, which by default match the common case: fields separated by spaces and tabs, records by newlines). I suppose one could argue that if you are using a programming language like awk, you are "cheating," but I would say that awk is really designed to be used in these sorts of situations. It may be the case that this is non-portable -- I only use GNU awk -- but one could potentially use perl if portability is an issue:
a lot of present solutions even break if you have spaces in file names -- and prohibiting that is, in my strong opinion, neither desirable nor realistic.
Agreed, though the article points out an easy solution to that also: a nonbreaking space should be the default for filenames that have spaces (users should not see any difference, although I cannot say with confidence that there are no UIs out there that would display nonbreaking spaces as something other than whitespace).
Palm trees and 8
Every time there's a new article about Windows/Microsoft anything, ever, no matter what the subject 90% of the posts try and just poo-poo it. In the meantime, the real world will (normally) pick the right tool for the job and ignore the petty politics & gripes that gets in the way of real discussion which seems to be common-place here.
IMHO Windows does try to "be" linux as Linux is so flexible as to run on anything from $20 routers to incredably scalable multi-CPU servers. There is some overlap of course, by largely the two technologies service different needs IMO.
So calm down kids, we can all be friends, see? Some of us like MS toys, some of us prefer others. Let's try and not flame-war each other ok?
throw new NoSignatureException();
I am sure, however, that there will be cases where this will not do what you want e.g. if you need to change the delimiter or something to that effect
Or if your column can have spaces. :-)
Agreed, though the article points out an easy solution to that also: a nonbreaking space should be the default for filenames that have spaces
Actually, I kind of like that solution (especially paired with a kernel modification to translate between nonbreaking spaces being presented to the outside world and normal spaces on disk -- to promote interoperability), but it's only "easy" in a pretty strange sense of that word considering that it isn't backwards compatible and there's not a good way to type a NBSP.
if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.
I generally assume that shell scripts are insecure / exploitable anyway, and I would not expose a shell script to every random thing that might be thrown at me from a malicious person (i.e. one that was obtained from the net). Also, most of what I use my shell for are files that were created either by me or by people in my group (who I can generally assume would not try to attack me in this fashion, since we all have sudo privileges on each others' systems anyway).
Palm trees and 8
And, of course, regarding awk; it's still usually easier to remember that, e.g., ls will give you the mtime in the LastWriteTime field as opposed to fields 6-8.
Not root credentials. Yet the server was rooted...
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Its not very windows like lately that to accomplish typical normal useful system administration on a windows machine requires copy and pasting arcane powershell gibberish from KB articles.
Actually, I kind of like that solution (especially paired with a kernel modification to translate between nonbreaking spaces being presented to the outside world and normal spaces on disk -- to promote interoperability), but it's only "easy" in a pretty strange sense of that word considering that it isn't backwards compatible and there's not a good way to type a NBSP.
I think the idea was that system calls like stat() or open() would automatically convert all spaces to nonbreaking spaces, and thus nobody would have to be aware of the difference (unless for some reason there was a program that actually broke because it expected 0x20 in filenames -- which I would say is a bug and an edge case).
Palm trees and 8
Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.
One way to remotely execute a program (gkrellm) on another host, this example assumes you're using passwordless authentication via public key:
ssh -X USER@192.168.1.100 -p 2222 gkrellm
Using PowerScript:
$wsman = new-pssession -computername -port -authentication default -credential $cred
$output = invoke-command -session $wsman -scriptblock {get-process}
remove-pssession -session $wsman (not required)
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I would never ever want a Mac server in my Data Center
And neither would Apple it seems, at least not for big stuff like their new Cloud platform, which runs on Azure (Windows) and AWS (Linux I presume, but do not know)
And is the only browser which many corporate users are still stuck on a 10 year old version of because Microsoft deliberately made it difficult to migrate away from. Way to consider business needs.
You, sir, are a dumbass.
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work
You are either clueless or drunk on cool-aid, and I say that as someone who has been accused of being an MS shill a lot lately (just because I like WP7 a lot better than my iPhone). Linux is an excellent operating system for a wide variety of things. A huge portion of the WWW runs entirely on Linux, and that is saying something. Also, some of the virtualized stuff IBM does with Linux is astonishing.
no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked
You are, sadly, as ignorant, stupid and cool-aid drinking as is North Korea. He's in love with Redmond and you are in love with Linus. Neither of you are half-way rational or knowledgeable. Just dumb shills with nothing to offer.
Wow, that is the clueless statement of the year. Windows server is a copy of something Apple has done? Really? What? Does Apple even have a server OS? The answer to that is clearly a big resounding "no" since, when Apple needed a huge server infrastructure to support their iCloud initiative, they turned to Microsoft and Amazon for help. You do know that iCloud is running on Windows and Azure, don't you?
Hmm, so now that I remember more about what he said (I read that article about a month ago), it may not be as big of a problem as I was thinking. As long as opening a file would work with both spaces and NBSPs, I think it would be fine.
(Though again I would slightly refine the idea and suggest doing a translation on both sides: on open translate NBSP to 0x20, and store it as 0x20 on disk, then on readdir and such translate 0x20 to NBSP. This would go a long way to preserving compatibilities with other systems.)
Yup, and that's what makes it much worse for shell usage - it's like using tcl or perl as your shell. Worse is better.
I am trolling
Bash works on Unix because there are lots of little support programs. Every service has an extensive set of command line options.
On windows you don't have that stuff so you couldn't just, for example, port a cron script to use Task Scheduler.
I like the Amiga way. The Arexx scripting language combined the best aspects of shell scripting, GUI apps and an interpreted programming environment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Netcraft's web server market share stats are similar, although a bit more extreme. They show Microsoft's IIS at a bit under 16% marketshare, compared to the market leader, Apache's httpd, at about 65%.
I would not say VMWare is an alternative OS to Windows Server. VMWare doesn't have any apps that can compete with Windows apps. VMWare (ESXi) lets customers run multiple OSs concurrently. Some customers run Windows, some run Linux and other OSs.
VMWare isn't really a customized version of Linux either. IIRC ESX uses a linux kernel just to load the VMWare kernel. Linux was used in the past to provide the console to interface with the VMWare kernel as well.
Anything about future features is really just speculation.
As always, I do reserve the right to be wrong. ;-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Not needing to do text parsing on the results of commands?
I find PowerShell's use of an actual object model as opposed to text streams to be quite convenient.
You want to replicate a continually changing list of console sessions for tens or even hundreds of thousands of workstations, across a global network, for a report that no-one will ever read? I mean seriously, a report of some sort showing 200,000 people logged onto 250,000 devices (workstations, multiple logons, terminal servers, admin sessions etc) - what the hell are you going to do with it? Think enterprise scale here, not small business.
OK and now what are you going to do about the site that got disconnected because the WAN went down for 12 hours? Are those users still online? What happens when the 2Mbps link comes back up and you have to replicate 200,000 changes from the rest of the world? Lots of enterprises can't get 100Mbps WAN links for every site for tuppence a week - or indeed, for any price.
What will you do about notebooks not connected to the LAN? It's still a current logon. Someone is still accessing corporate information.
What about sessions that have been idle for 15 minutes? Is that still a logon? What about a session idle for a day? Over a weekend? (Don't give me that crap about "logging out is the policy" because users don't and won't do it).
The whole concept of having a single database with all current sessions, up to date, in a form that is usable, went out the door with NetWare (oh, and NetWare/VMS never told you who was on the network, it was about who was on the server). In case you didn't notice, there's a small difference. The horse has bolted, found a mare, had multiple foals, died, been picked clean, and its bones are now bleached in the sun. There's no point locking the barn door.
awk instead of cut. How many people have gotten used to
ps -ef | awk '/foo/ { print $1,$4}'
And that's not even fancy awk scripting.
It also has the advantage of being standardized (Always use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris, not /usr/bin/awk)
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
*snip*
do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations).
*snip*
Um... I just did this on my N900 running a debian-based system and busybox's ash.
I get the exact same output for both. And it looks fine.
I just installed bash 4.2, and tried again. Same thing.
Please elaborate what I *should* have gotten?
I meant that in powershell.
On a win7/win2k8r2 system, run powershell, type 'ps|cat' In linux, they look the same. In windows, ps|cat prints binary data to the screen instead of the text you get with 'ps'
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It requires a script writer to be a bit more 'programmer' when outputting data. Most admins understand text data like a basic spreadsheet. Good admins can program correctly, but the notion that you throw things like '.toString' in betrays how it's not quite as straightforward as shell.
PowerShell is neat in its own way, but it doesn't excuse MS's 'not invented here' as they have *continually* failed to just include a damn bourne shell and ssh access (the wrapping remote cli invocation in unwieldy WS-Man is just absolutely insane next to ssh, powershell hides it from you but under the covers it is nasty and you don't get to ignore that cross-platform). MS can offer differentiation without precluding compatibility, and this failure to pursue that is what ticks me off very much.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ok, so some commands detect if stdout is a terminal and strip formatting and *could* do more drastic things. I don't see how it's any more intuitive to recognize whether every component in a pipe chain is backed by a win32 exe or a cmdlet versus memorizing some commands strip out color codes when piped (I can't think of an example that does something more drastic than stripping color codes, and I can forgive that since the ANSI codes would appear as 'data' counter-intuitively to pipe consumers, it's making the output more like the plaintext that the user sees, not less.
Even the most recent PowerShell terminal is restricted in silly ways (won't let me make it wider than a certain bound, and I have no idea why). Between not having a plain old bourne shell, not doing ssh, and still having text terminals that behave in boneheaded ways, I get frustrated.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ah. I must have misread.
I don't see how it's any more intuitive to recognize whether every component in a pipe chain is backed by a win32 exe or a cmdlet versus memorizing some commands strip out color codes when piped
I'm not saying it's more intuitive, I'm saying it's possible. If you don't remember whether something is an exe or a cmdlet, you can find that out easily. If you want to know whether a program behaves differently when piping or attached to a console, there's no way to figure that out. Maybe it says in the man page. Maybe you can test it (but will one test be representative, or will that very depending on your command line flags and environment variables?). The only real way to know is go look at the code.
I can't think of an example that does something more drastic than stripping color codes
Personally I think that ls displaying columns (dir /w style) or not is more drastic, but that's just me. I actually have aliases that force color codes on for ls and grep so that they aren't stripped out and I can pass them around, so having to work around commands that do this mode switching isn't just some theoretical problem for me. (I also have less aliased to less -R and a decolor script to strip the escapes when I don't want them.)
Even the most recent PowerShell terminal is restricted in silly ways (won't let me make it wider than a certain bound, and I have no idea why).
Because the Windows terminal is an awful piece of software. You might take a look at PoshConsole. In a quick experiment, that seems to behave better on that front. I haven't used it enough to thoroughly evaulate though, but it seems to have some features that I think should be picked up my more terminals. (I like some of the thinking that went into this, though I'm not sure if I agree with many of the specific choices he made.)
(You do know that you can actually change the screen buffer size in preferences though, right? I am still limited to 210 characters, but it's better than 80.)
Ssh only allows you to execute a list of pre-defined commands (made before you connect). With PowerShell you can interactively work with remote computer.
It is too obvious you have never used ssh. Working interactively is exactly what t does. I can't believe I have allowed a troll to drag me into this :-(
Woosh!
I use Mac, PC, Linux, Unix at work and at home.
When it comes to virtualization, VMWare infrastructure is the better way to go. No need to worry about the underlying OS licensing/etc. Otherwise, there are VMWare versions for both Mac & Windows. Parallels is also an option.
The fact that you state that Microsoft servers are great for certain business needs (insinuating that you have them in your dat center), but then in the same virtual breath state that you'd never want a Mac server in your data center tells me you a) know nothing about it (so why have it) or b) are a biased asshat.
Choose your poison.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
No it doesn't, what the fuck...
If you want an SSH session (a shell) on the remote host, you just connect to it.
Why do I feel like I'm talking to someone who just learned about computers and is in the 9th grade all of a sudden?
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
beuges doesn't really exist, he(it) is just a powerscript running on a windows box.
OH wow... I'm totally backing away from this fresh meat. I know others are just waiting to taste....
I'll just say that exchange is great for internal use, but anybody halfway (even a quarter) intelligent puts an smtp buffer or some form between the exchange cluster and the internet when it comes to email.
At one of my last job in 2005, a qmail server worked nicely to perform spam classifications/etc before handing it to exchange ;)
There are appliances for this nowadays.
I'm glad most places still keep important things on Unix platforms, and these "all uber cool large business are doing it!" ideas aren't true. Sure, sharepoint, exchange, and other Microsoft products are Windows, but that in no way means they Pwn the datacenter.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?
These are just some of the advantages of using objects. There are more, and also some disadvantages, to be sure. But on the whole it allows for much more robust and readable scripting.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.
Yeah, right...UNIX, 30+ years, enough said.
VMware is not a customised Linux. Please educate yourself.
Text is not a magical thing that just works out of the blue. Text requires as much support as objects do. Text requires encoding specifications, fonts that reflect those encoding specifications, editors that understand those encoding specifications and use that fonts, etc.
Even if text is simple ASCII, you still need a program to print those bytes to the console. You still need ASCII, in the first place, to be understood by all subsystems in the same way. If you had two computers or two programs that used a different encoding, they couldn't talk to each other, even if text was all they exchanged. You still need a font. You still need a console display.
It just happens that text was there first before objects, and therefore the infrastructure to support text is already up and running. Had objects been invented first, you would not have said that text is the universal interface; you would have said that objects is the universal interface, because everyone would understand objects.
Too true!
The only reason I learned linux is because I like to play with computers and I can't afford to play with expensive proprietary stuff. So I mucked around with Linux and discovered how well it suited many of the day to day tasks I perform. I have always managed majority Windows, or all Windows networks. One of the first things I do at a new job, is find an old pc to setup as a headless linux server. It gives me access to a wealth of tools that are just not available on Windows, or if they are would blow my budget.
I can ssh in, start a screen session, and pull those big downloads into my Samba share. I can sniff network traffic and look for arp problems. I can run a wiki to quickly document things. I also windows imaging from my linux box.
I wouldn't know half the things I know today if I had never learned linux. Maybe that's why all these MS only admins seem like such halfwits to me.
Cheap storage VM.
User's can't create groups in windows either. They could add individual accounts to each folders permissions, however in every company I've worked at this was discouraged, or disallowed. Users usually have read/write, but they could not modify permissions, otherwise they usually add people to their personal shared folder and forget about it.
The proper way to do this would usually be to request a share or a group be created by the box's admin or root user.
Cheap storage VM.
Look at the Zune - why did Microsoft need to be in the music player business? Only because Apple was and succeeding and they were jealous.
Yes, because that's how large corporations are run, not on the basis that there is a clear market opportunity present in an associated field to your own. If Apple could make billions of dollars from MP3 players, and others like Sony, Phillips et al tried to as well, why shouldn't Microsoft have a go?
Pre-iPod, Apple were just a computer company too, like Microsoft.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why it is is because large scale management for Microsoft servers are not that there for some tasks. I said Microsoft servers are good for certain tasks not all tasks. And the virtual servers we have are all running on VMware ESX, not Microsoft. There is some test servers set up using HyperV, but they aren't used for anything other than testing. On the security end, many critical issues with Mac OS take longer to be fixed than that of Linux or Microsoft with Linux probably being the fastest. Example being with the certs from about two weeks ago, Linux and Microsoft removed them nearly a full week before Apple. The Certs issue was unique because you could remove them yourself, but I expect faster response on such an issue. If you wanted to use a server that you would typically use Windows for a Citrix XenApp Server, it would not be possible nor would it be possible for the clients. Yes, Citrix has a client for Mac, BUT no USB support our company uses PnP devices. Could you uses a Mac Server as a file server without an issues, probably, but why diversify my data center more than needed?
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Pre-iPod, Apple were just a computer company too, like Microsoft.
Microsoft hasn't ever been a computer company, that I recall. Apple always has, so the iPod wasn't a big deal for them. Microsoft has re-branded some mice and keyboards but to the best of my knowledge has always been a software company. Both iPods and Zunes are computers, just small ones. It's a different skillset - one that Apple had 25 years of experience with at the time.
Apple also makes operating systems and office software, but Sony makes computers and also makes cameras, lab equipment, and movies. This doesn't mean Microsoft or Apple should start a movie studio or start making lab equipment.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wrong. I use ssh for that these days, although in the past the uu- and r- commands were used. Do you really think that Microsoft is the only company that realized that remote administration is a good thing? My God -- they were the last ones to the party.
Doh! I responded with the same info before reading this (although your response was a lot better than mine).
Sadly they are critical. That's why we lost so many thousands of man-hours in productivity at my previous job due to the Exchange servers randomly dying. I don't doubt that you'll dismiss the IT guys as being a bunch of noobs, etc. but it was the largest Exchange installation in the world at the time, so that seems unlikely. During the 10 years I worked there, you could count on Exchange going down for at least an hour during any quarter and you could expect to lose connectivity for several minutes at a time during any week. There's no way they could ever make a claim anywhere close to 5 9's with it.