Windows Services For Unix Now Free Of Charge

pole writes "Version 3.5 of Services for Unix will be free. Previously, it was $99. This article at Information Week has the details. It contains an NFS client and server in addition to POSIX libraries and utilities including pthreads. Aside from the NFS utilities, how does the environment compare to Cygwin?" An anonymous reader adds links to coverage at News.com and at geek.com, writing "The reviews for these tools have been highly favorable. It looks like the next volley has been fired in the struggle between Windows and Linux."

Re:so lets make this simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It's that simple. SFU used to be known as Interix... you might have heard of them before MS ate them...

how it compares

[larry bagina]

I've not used cygwin, but I have used the SFU demo.

They include gcc, but most of the other utilities are from OpenBSD or other non-GPL sources (there are about 40 different licenses included). ActiveState perl is also included, though you can get that free anyhow.

No multithreading

[gatkinso]

A shallow compatibility layer. I like it better than Cygwin, but that is just me.

Not all so hot

[etymxris]

I guess it depends on what you use it for. But as I have to do development work in Windows, I thought I'd try it out. Searching through the million line source tree our company has took about 10 times as long with 'grep' that came with "Services for UNIX" as it did with 'grep' that came with a now ancient version of MKS. Both of these were slower that current GNU grep on a Linux box, but the difference between GNU and MKS grep is not dramatic.

The lesson stays, however. If you expect to basically start with all the power of your Linux box, you'll be sorely dissappointed, just as someone expected the ease of use of Windows coming to Linux will be sorely dissappointed.

Re:so lets make this simple

[Sexy Bern]

My experience of SFU was that it was much more reliable than Hummingbird's implementation of NFS client.

I really can't remember any glitches using it for 2+ years against Solaris 2.6 boxes.

Based upon OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft based this product upon OpenBSD: http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008 [deadly.org]

MS finds use for their SCO license...

[PSaltyDS]

This was speculated on in an article [groklaw.net] at Groklaw [groklaw.net], that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.

SMB is incredibly slow...

[etymxris]

going between Windows and Linux boxes. I speak from first hand experience. An FTP transfer of the same (very large) file goes 10 times as fast on my gigabit network. I can't speak for NFS, but SMB is certainly not the be-all-end-all for serving files.

MS' Hopes

[hirschma]

Free SFU will likely cause some folks to do the following:

* Stop booting to Linux on their dual boot box,
* Stop buying VMware (for desktop use),
* Stop using that little OSS box on the floor.

Instead, they'll just SFU - it costs nothing, and it lets me run Apache/PHP/MySql, or whatever.

After enough of this behavior modification, they'll lower the boom.

And then SFU will stand for: So, Fuck You.

Jonathan

Re: got your source right here

[ubiquitin]

Interix [interix.com] used OpenBSD [openbsd.com] as is evidenced at deadly.org [deadly.org]

So like 95% of it is just OpenBSD, mostly pulled from theh 3.0 release tree.

Specifications and Download

[Jonny Royale]

If your interested:

The intro & specifications for this are available here [microsoft.com]. The SFU (anyone else wanna add a T there somewhere? :-)) hompage is here [microsoft.com]. However, it appears that the free download hasn't been made available yet on the page.

Re:so lets make this simple

[wwest4]

Network Appliance.

Re:so lets make this simple

[skinfitz]

Does this mean in a week I can go to Microsoft's website, download a .exe file, run it, and be able to mount NFS partitions off my linux file server?

So long as you are talking about Windows Server then yes.

Re:Good, but not great

[fastdecade]

Being required to sometimes develop under windows, I need this integration. Haven't used unix services, but I find Cygwin integration very "challenging". I know other people who've given up on it simply because they can't navigate the hard drive.

Took some playing around to work out "/cygdrive/c" for c: etc. But working out how to have a bash profile, a home dir, etc, take a lot of time. Great project, but certainly not something you can use to solve an immediate problem.

If Unix services integrates cleaner, I suppose I'll have to sacrifice the tools.

It would be nice, though, and certainly possible, if a product could be built on top of cygwin to provide a more seamless experience.

Including giving credit to OpenBSD.

[emil]

As you can see. [deadly.org]

how does the environment compare to Cygwin?

[sICE]

1) WSFU is faster (IO/API/...)
2) WSFU is better integrated with win32 architecture (OLE/ODBC/...)
3) WSFU make a lot of things easier than cygwin with windows

BUT, i wouldnt trade cygwin for it, note that i have both installed here. I just isolated what i needed from WSFU and was better than cygwin and added them last in my path. I dont have any preferences, but cygwin is waaay more complete, and you have the +/- the same versions of the application that runs on linux. Same config files work fine, same behaviours (which isnt the case with WSFU), etc.

For me, WSFU is just a little + to cygwin.

Re:so lets make this simple

[Laur]

Sure, if you're running Windows Server 2000/2003. AFAIK, it's a server-only service/application.

Look again. [microsoft.com]

Operating System:
Microsoft Windows NT(R) Workstation 4.0, Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 6a or later, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003

Re:From India with love

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.microsoft.com/india/indiadev/projects/s ervices-for-unix.asp [microsoft.com]

Re:Freedom?

[David McBride]

There's a more important architectual difference.

Cygwin is built on top of the Win32 APIs on top of the NT kernel core.

SFU is built straight on top of the core kernel; Win32 API variances (which have caused headaches for the Cygwin implementors of years) are no longer factored in.

Moreover, the core state information (such as process listings and various other things) come straight from the core. It is perfectly possible to send a SIGSTOP or a SIGKILL to Word.exe (a Win32 app) from the SFU universe and watch Word stop dead or die, respectively.

As well as NFS mounting and export capabilities, SFU also supports NIS and can do various user mappings between the Windows and Unix worlds.

Beware the default password set for some of these options.

Memo to self: no service that requires a password for security should be enabled by default with a standard initial passphrase.

SFU sucks

[medeii]

I've got an MSDN subscription at my company, so I was installing and using SFU for awhile. Other posters have noticed that SFU's version of grep is slow, though, so I did a bit of research and I've taken to installing the Win32 ports of the GNU utilities also. There's a SourceForge project called UnixUtils [sourceforge.net] that ships a bunch of them in either a zip file (unzip to %systemroot%\system32\) or as a binary installer. They work natively within cmd.exe, so there's no need to use a separate shell as SFU does.

It is missing a few things, but between grabbing SFU for its commands like ls and cp, and the unixutils package, you get the best of both worlds.

OT: Re:so lets make this simple

[JamesOfTheDesert]

Not only that, but IBM is IBM now and no longer an acronym.

And not only that, but "IBM" was never an acronymn [reference.com], but an initialism [reference.com].

Re:so lets make this simple

[wwest4]

Network Appliance [netapp.com] is a company that provides NAS products. I was answering the question as to whether or not there was a NAS solution that reliably did NFS and CIFS. to be precise :)

The BIG news here...

[JKR]

isn't the rather poor shell utilities, it's the extensions to the Active Directory schema that allow you to authenticate users on Linux against a Windows 2000 DC using OpenLDAP and PAM. It works very well to give a single sign-on setup in a hetereogenous environment.

It's marketed as a means of migrating NIS users to AD, but it works even better for LDAP, with suitable libnss_ldap.conf and pam_ldap.conf files. The only previous solution was AD4UNIX which no longer seems to be maintained, and is flaky on later service packs. For us, having this for free is good news.

Jon

Notepad replacements

[tepples]

some people would be clamoring for an OSS alternative to Notepad

Both Vim and GNU Emacs have been ported to Microsoft Windows.

Dave Scott of MS is giving a talk on this tonight

[GeneOff]

Dave Scott, of Microsoft is talking about this tonight at the St. Louis Unix User's group.

His talk is entitled:

"Running UNIX Applications on Microsoft Operating Systems
by Dave Scott, Microsoft"

Here is the web site http://www.sluug.org

There is a location link on the main page. Starts at 6:30 or 7:00.

Ed

Re:No multithreading

[Temporal]

I'm confused. Are you saying that Microsoft's POSIX layer has no multithreading? Because not only does the article say otherwise, but it says right there in the writeup:

It contains ... POSIX libraries and utilities including pthreads.

I've used both

[Dunkirk]

I've used both, SFU more extensively than Cygwin, though. SFU's NFS stuff is flaky. That's just the bottom line. I would much rather export shares to Windows clients with Samba than NFS. (I suppose it doesn't help that I'm not a big fan of NFS, either, but that's just full disclosure. It's the only thing I've seen that can reliably lock up a *nix machine. Now, of course, there are circumstances where you want this, but usually not.) Also, if you want all the features of their command line, you'll have to switch your Windows machine into a case-sensitive mode. It made me nervous to change something so fundamental to Windows. Maybe they'll fix that in this upcoming version; I dunno. On the other hand, using Cygwin is nice, but it's like a big tease. Most of it works like you want. It's just that if you're used to using Linux and ALL of it's tools, you're going to hit the wall pretty quick. (I just ran into this a couple weeks ago, and I've already forgotten what it was I was wanting.)

A lot of stuff ported for MSU 3.5 beta

[Aggrajag]

Can be found from Interix [interix.com]. You can change the crappy KSH to Bash and get a nice build system up and going in no time. I normally use Cygwin [cygwin.com] but I'm going to give this a try, even if it isn't GPL'd.

Re:so lets make this simple

[mobiGeek]

Interix, developed by Softway Systems, of which a group of the original employees/execs came from MKS [mkssoftware.com] (Mortice Kern Systems).

Re:GET IT HERE!!!!

[grendelkhan]

That's the beta, released back in July. The final comes out tomorrow.

Re:so lets make this simple

[Baudhuin]

By way of some background:

The NFS client as of 3.0 is an improvement over the prior version in that it transparently conveys perms and ownership (according to whatever mapping has been established). It has support for a /net sort of mapping within the Interix/POSIX subsystem, which is nice but fairly slow (though I note that this was particularly apparent to me because I was working remotely over DSL; I suspect there was a fair amount of roundtripping).

In general, however, I think that NFS client access by way of the Win32 subsystem (i.e., not in the Interix POSIX subsystem) is pretty fast, though you might lose some of the perms transparency and there is no /net and it might not handle symlinks nicely. I remember benchmarking a version of the software prior to it being integrated in SFU, and it was about 3x faster than Samba in a LAN setting. [Kind of a an informal metrics: I was compiling a large project with network-based sources.]

It will be interesting to see if the performance within the POSIX has improved with the new version (3.5).

Re:NFS client for win! (summary)

[the frizz]

Microsoft has had this PC-NFS client out for a while now. I see knowledge base article 324084 [microsoft.com] was last updated on 6/6/2003 and my MSDN Aug 2002 Unix for Windows Services 3.0 CD included this too.

And seems like cheap options have long been available DOS/Windows NFS clients for a long time. In 1994, this summary [netsys.com] mentions XFS [unicamp.br] (shareware NFS client from Germany, not the SGI filesystem) TSoft [rawbandwidth.com] and Sun's PC-NFS [sun.com].

Nowdays you also have at least these option, and you are right, many are not cheap.

• HummingBird [hummingbird.com] $300 My past impressions were always of good quality and features.
• Reflection [wrq.com] $88 I know this name.
• ProNFS [labtam-inc.com] $40 (shareware?)
• DiskAccess [accessnfs.com] $179
• SuperNFS [frontiertech.com] $160 Found with google.

I only heard of the first two. The rest found with Goggle [google.com].

When will it be free

[superpulpsicle]

I went to the microsoft site to download this thing but it's only beta. The real deal still cost $99, so the question is WHEN WILL IT BE FREE? Microsoft SFU download [microsoft.com]

Re: Samba for removeable drives

[CommandNotFound]

I use NFS under Linux for /home mounts and such and have found it to be extremely reliable in over five years of daily use, but NFS won't let go of removeable drives, so it doesn't work well for sharing automounted CD-ROM, floppy, or zip drives. For those, Samba is the way to go, and with pre/postexec settings, Samba will automatically mount/umount the drives so autofs is not needed on the server side.

Re:Thank you Microsoft

[mixmasta]

Windows XP and up have tons of commandline programs included in the default install and also have a whole new scripting environment as well called "windows scripting host." These are avail as downloads to earlier windows.

WSH is extremely powerful, at times even more powerful than the unix tools, since you have access to the whole windows api in a script. In unix you could still write a program if you needed to, of course. Your info on windows scriptability is several years out of date. SFU just ups the ante.

That said, I still haven't bothered to learn WSH, because I want to move away from proprietary os's soon.

Re:Freedom?

[the frizz]

I too liked the fact that SFU has more access to the Windows core. E.g., some per process stuff can be seen via ps and /proc, The cmd.exe shell executes many of the utilities. But still not enough for me to switch kick cygwin off my system. The cygwin bash shell default setup beats ksh.

Here's some features that would have excited me, but I didn't find in SFU.

• I was hoping to be able to truss(1) the native windows executeables, but I didn't have any luck with that.
• A list of file descriptors in use under /proc/PID/fd/...
• The SFU NFS client did follow symlinks when the target was on the same device, but it didn't seem to follow a symlink to another device. I tried making targets of c:\temp and \\host\share, but even though Windows Explorer could see the target directly, when Windows Explorer browses the remote NFS Network the the symlink target did not resolve. (A trace shows the NFS server returning the right target name to the SFU NFS client.)

Add outwit to the mix

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Now that you have SFU freely available go download and install outwit [spinellis.gr]. Outwit is a suite of tools based on the Unix tool design principles allowing the processing of Windows application data with sophisticated data manipulation pipelines. The outwit tools offer access to the Windows clipboard, the registry, the event log, relational databases, document properties, shell links, and the event log.

As an example, you can change all registry entries pointing to a user's home directory by running

winreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER |
sed -n 's/C:\\home/D:\\home/gp' |
winreg

A Usenix technical conference paper [spinellis.gr] describes the tools and a number of applications.

#include "/dev/tty"

Re:so lets make this simple

[rifter]

msconfig and mozilla are your friends.

Microsoft dropped msconfig with win98. It was never installed by default anyway. Even with msconfig you still could not kill everything and you still cannot choose whether or not to install every piece of software there is on the machine. Ordinary applications still replace system libraries with NO WARNING and service packs are misleading because system libraries get replaced with older bugged and/or vulnerable versions with no way to tell beyond manually cataloguing every file's checksum (version, size, and date are not guaranteed to be correct and usually wildly innacurate as methods of determining a file's origin on a microsoft OS).

With the exception of the Microsoft innovation of creating programs you cannot kill or uninstall ON PURPOSE, these are all old problems, predating MSDOS which everyone else has figured a way to correct EXCEPT Microsoft precisely because they do not really care. This is still the case all the way to Windows 2003 and I predict that it will be the case with Longhorn.

Re:This is a good thing

[Haeleth]

we'll see an OpenOffice that runs in X off of this SFU kit

Well... you might, if this SFU kit contained an X server.

Which it doesn't.

No numeric UID support!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's NFS server doesn't support changing the owner of a file to a numeric UID. We spent close to a thousand dollars in support calls before they finally admitted to that. This makes Microsoft's NFS server useless for most environments, because there is no easy way to sync-up the passwd file from the UNIX machine to the NT server. Unless you have a trivial # of users or accounts that don't often change (uhhh, does anyone not have a large turn-over now?), it's very hard to use the NT server as an NFS server. Once again Microsoft screws-up the simple things. I wasted two weeks of my life dealing with that garbage.

Re:SFU sucks

[medeii]

Thanks for the snide comment. I did read the article, actually, but it doesn't change the usefulness of the tools I linked to nor the sluggishness of their current incarnation -- two things you seemed to have overlooked in your haste to nitpick.

Furthermore, the tools provided by Microsoft are usually not the GNU versions. If someone is used to using grep provided by Your_Favorite_Distro, there's still a learning curve as you realize that grep -r asdf * now requires different options -- something you don't have to worry about if you grab the direct ports.

Re:When will it be free

[omega9]

From the post:

Version 3.5 of Services for Unix will be free.

Commonly, the phrase "will be" usually means something to the effect of "later", or "not now", or perhaps even "later then now". This lends to the idea that if you go do something now, you will be trying before "will be" has had the chance to become "has been" or "is".

You can download 3.5_beta for free. I'm guessing here, but I imagine that when 3.5 final is released is "WHEN IT WILL BE FREE". The "real deal" is still at version 3.0 which, as it's not 3.5, is not free. But if this is something that you actually were interested in and kept your eye on you would have noticed that when 3.0 was released Microsoft made it available for a limited time for only the cost of shipping. At least, that's how I got my copy.

Re:wsfu ?? should be Unix Services for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to understand some history of the product. Originally it was a NFS/NIS server, so it really was services FOR Unix.

Later on MS intergrated the "Interix" package which is (as you say) Unix API Calls For Windows.

Yeah, its pretty nice

[Nailer]

NFS shares show up under the network neighborhood, and you can mount them to a directory or drive letter just like you can SMB shares.

Re:PEBKAC, pure and simple

[Bad Boy Marty]

Hmmm. Maybe it is you who is high.

From the acl(5) man page:

Linux Access Control Lists implement the full set of functions and utilities defined for Access Control Lists in POSIX.1e, and several extensions. The implementation is fully compliant with POSIX.1e draft 17; extensions are marked as such.

There are (as noted in other replies above) several Unix and Linux filesystems that implement ACLs with dynamic inheritance.

As for your left nut, you can keep it -- in a vice.

Re:so lets make this simple

[balster neb]

> Sure! Just don't forget to read the gazillion-page EULA very carefully ;-)

Interestingly, Interix -- an important part of their SFU contains [microsoft.com] a lot of GPL'd code including gcc, gdb etc. Interesing especially when you consider that they still call the GPL an "IPR Impairing" license.

In any case, microsoft will slowly continue to embrace unix. Now they are strongly acknowleging it's precence. In any case Windows is slowly becoming more and more like any *nix system.

Re:so lets make this simple

[rar]

I could install Interix on my Windows NT box, and then create an account on the NT box with the same name as any solaris account. Then I could connect to any resources on network drives using the Interix tools and have full read/write/delete/etc. privledges on files with that person's permissions.

This sounds like the usual problem with the unexisting authentication in old NFS. Basically: you must configure your network to only allow trusted machines to mount NFS, because if they can mount NFS they also have access to all users files and it is completly up to the software on that machine to prevent a user from messing with other users files.

Now, if someone pulls the network cable of one of your computers and put their own laptop there instead it can be configured to mimic the removed computer -- ouch -- Or if someone hacks one of your computers, you can basically regard all you network files as toast... You know, this is why things like AFS and kerberos was invented...