Notice I said average uptime. I've had the server configured how I like it and running for about 62 days. I also log every down time. So far I'm at 15 reboots. This means on average it stays up aproximately 4 days. All reboots have been caused by illegal operations that bring down IIS or the FTP server, or the system just hangs. I've poured through the IIS configs and they are almost identical to my NT 4 machine which stays up on average 30 days. The NT 4 mahine gets about 5000 web hits a day and the Win 2000 box gets about 750 web hits a day. There is about 500MB of ftp traffic a day on both. SQL Server is powering the database side and other less used services are running on both machines. The main cause of crashes seams to be when traffic is high. I wouldn't consider either box to be on a heavy load. But they still crash.
Now, I have a question for you. What setup options or initial installation options could I have done that would cause my box to crash on an average of every 4 days on this type of load. And does your box have a similar load on it. I would be very interested in any information you have.
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts.
Anyone else notice the line that says:
You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback.
Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources.
Next we have this item:
Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow.
This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction.
Next we have stability.
As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment.
That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC.
I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others.
Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell.
Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor.
Bottom Line.
1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there.
2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features.
3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision.
4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI.
There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts. Anyone else notice the line that says: You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback. Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources. Next we have this item: Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow. This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction. Next we have stability. As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment. That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC. I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others. Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell. Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor. Bottom Line. 1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there. 2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features. 3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision. 4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI. There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
2 thumbs up for the TNT program here at Purdue. There are very few schools that can offer such a wide variety of computer interests, with a top notch faculty, and a tuition price that beats the heck out of Stanford. It is true that the department is leaning towards the evil empire, but there is a lot of excellent concepts discussed and implemented. Besides, what school isn't on board with MS? Very few any more. Professors are frequently available, and enjoy helping students. If your a Jedi programmer, then CS is probably where you should be. If you are at all interested in being in the Information systems or networking field along with some programming, then TNT is the way to go. Either way, Purdue is a superb school with one great benefit. No $60,000 student loans to pay off like a Standford or Rose-Hullman student would have.
Well, well, well. If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times. "But Zach, there's nothing to do here at Purdue." People that can't find anything to do at Purdue either are socially inept or they have a very small interest area (i.e. underwater basket weaving and nothing else). First of all, there are an endless number of parties with a lot of them being actually fun (unless you go thinking that you will have a bad time). Secondly, if your not into parties, then join a club. Countless clubs ranging from Skydiving (my personal favorite) to the PLUG (Purdue LUG) to snowboarding. There's also your standard sport clubs and political clubs. So let's say clubs aren't your deal. Well, we have excellent football, men's basketball, women's basketball, and women's volleyball teams among others. Hate sports and everything else I've mentioned? Then sit in your room and watch great movies on boiler TV for free. Surf the Internet on your ethernet or ADSL connection. Drive to Indianapolis, or Chicago, or Detroit for a weekend and enjoy all three of these big cities without having the hassels of living in one. Don't have a car? Take the bus. Don't have any money? Get a job. But please, don't say there is nothing to do at Purdue.
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Notice I said average uptime. I've had the server configured how I like it and running for about 62 days. I also log every down time. So far I'm at 15 reboots. This means on average it stays up aproximately 4 days. All reboots have been caused by illegal operations that bring down IIS or the FTP server, or the system just hangs. I've poured through the IIS configs and they are almost identical to my NT 4 machine which stays up on average 30 days. The NT 4 mahine gets about 5000 web hits a day and the Win 2000 box gets about 750 web hits a day. There is about 500MB of ftp traffic a day on both. SQL Server is powering the database side and other less used services are running on both machines. The main cause of crashes seams to be when traffic is high. I wouldn't consider either box to be on a heavy load. But they still crash.
Now, I have a question for you. What setup options or initial installation options could I have done that would cause my box to crash on an average of every 4 days on this type of load. And does your box have a similar load on it. I would be very interested in any information you have.
Thanks.
NOTE -- forgot to select plain old text. Sorry.
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts.
Anyone else notice the line that says:
You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback.
Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources.
Next we have this item:
Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow.
This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction.
Next we have stability.
As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment.
That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC.
I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others.
Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell.
Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor.
Bottom Line.
1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there.
2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features.
3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision.
4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI.
There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts. Anyone else notice the line that says: You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback. Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources. Next we have this item: Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow. This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction. Next we have stability. As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment. That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC. I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others. Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell. Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor. Bottom Line. 1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there. 2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features. 3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision. 4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI. There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
2 thumbs up for the TNT program here at Purdue. There are very few schools that can offer such a wide variety of computer interests, with a top notch faculty, and a tuition price that beats the heck out of Stanford. It is true that the department is leaning towards the evil empire, but there is a lot of excellent concepts discussed and implemented. Besides, what school isn't on board with MS? Very few any more. Professors are frequently available, and enjoy helping students. If your a Jedi programmer, then CS is probably where you should be. If you are at all interested in being in the Information systems or networking field along with some programming, then TNT is the way to go. Either way, Purdue is a superb school with one great benefit. No $60,000 student loans to pay off like a Standford or Rose-Hullman student would have.
Well, well, well. If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times. "But Zach, there's nothing to do here at Purdue." People that can't find anything to do at Purdue either are socially inept or they have a very small interest area (i.e. underwater basket weaving and nothing else). First of all, there are an endless number of parties with a lot of them being actually fun (unless you go thinking that you will have a bad time). Secondly, if your not into parties, then join a club. Countless clubs ranging from Skydiving (my personal favorite) to the PLUG (Purdue LUG) to snowboarding. There's also your standard sport clubs and political clubs. So let's say clubs aren't your deal. Well, we have excellent football, men's basketball, women's basketball, and women's volleyball teams among others. Hate sports and everything else I've mentioned? Then sit in your room and watch great movies on boiler TV for free. Surf the Internet on your ethernet or ADSL connection. Drive to Indianapolis, or Chicago, or Detroit for a weekend and enjoy all three of these big cities without having the hassels of living in one. Don't have a car? Take the bus. Don't have any money? Get a job. But please, don't say there is nothing to do at Purdue.