Windows Server 2008 One Year On — Hit Or Miss? 386
magacious writes "Friday marked a year to the day since Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008, but did it have quite the impact the so-called software giant expected, or did it make more of a little squeak than a big bang? Before its arrival on 27 February 2008, it had been five long years since the release of the last major version of Windows Server. In a world that was moving on from simple client/server applications, and with server clouds on the horizon, Windows Server 2003 was looking long in the tooth. After a year of 'Vista' bashing, Microsoft needed its server project to be well received, just to relieve some pressure. After all, this time last year, the panacea of a well-received Windows 7 was still a long way off. So came the new approach: Windows Server 2008."
Re:Not a matter of opinion.. (Score:1, Insightful)
What a useless comment, something akin to:
"The Nazis, love them or hate them they were a force to be reckoned with..."
Well yeah, but so what?
Re:Anything like 2k3? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can mock all you want, but I find decreasing the attack vector for an out of the box install a sensible approach. Something all server intallations should do, regardless of their creators image.
Re:Not a matter of opinion.. (Score:1, Insightful)
I assume the OP's post is in regards to the summary's "did it have quite the impact the so-called software giant expected?"
Re:whats it give us? (Score:4, Insightful)
2k3 just works.
Does anyone have a compelling reason to use 2k8?
Re:Not a matter of opinion.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not useless, and in fact, it's the very first thing I thought to myself when I read the summary.
To further your own analogy, how seriously could you take an article that, in it's first paragraph dismissed the Nazi Germany as a something the world over-reacted to, and never should have taken seriously?
It sets a tone, that perhaps the author's views are badly colored.
Re:I expected more driver support (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a very unfair comparison. Servers need to be extremely cautious with drivers in order to provide the sort of 99.999% uptime expected for industry. Fedora and Debian are more comparable to MacOS or Windows XP this way, where it's easier to update and support oddball hardware configurations.
No, install CentOS or run Oracle or VMware servers on it, something with commercial support expected on it, and you're going to run into driver limitations because they've not had a year or more to test it under serious loads, and then it's safer to install in server configurations.
Re:whats it give us? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say a minimal install is very relevant for a file server... Who wants tons of crap on a machine thats only acting as a file server?
Re:whats it give us? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do you need a special OS to run a server ?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, despite what MS will tell you, a server should be fundamentally different to a desktop, it should have a lot less software installed... MS's server versions are quite the opposite, they're basically desktops with additional server applications installed, they have a ton of desktop related functionality that is completely useless on a server sitting in a rack somewhere.
Re:whats it give us? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a busy admin too. Fortunately it doesn't take long at all to install Ubuntu Server, apt-get install likewise-open, and then type "domainjoin-cli join my.domain my-username" in the command line.
When you use being "busy" as an excuse for being ignorant of your options, you do your employer a disservice. That page you linked to hasn't had a major edit in two years or so, and it does not reflect the current best practices for setting up a simple Linux/Samba file server with AD integration. And no, no extra $$ is required for Ubuntu Server.
Re:whats it give us? (Score:3, Insightful)
2k3 is good, but I have having to restart every week or so when MS puts out updates..
Re:whats it give us? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:whats it give us? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't disagree with what your saying, but I don't think thats the main reason people should go for a NT based solution.
I really, seriously think its the Trained Chimp factor.
If you set up a NT network properly, lock it down, and make sure someone with a clue looks in on it every once in a while, you can have a much lower pricepoint trained chimp fix the day to day problems; sure, there will be more day to day problems, but your chimps are a lot cheaper, and easier to find.
Also, I had a lot of problems trying to work with earlier versions of Samba; I imagine a lot of other people did, as well, it's going to take a while to get over the distrust.
Re:whats it give us? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please, in Debian installer, at the stage formatting disks before copying base system, installer offers you choose mount options, which include mounting with acls, anyway as far as I know, any modern distro comes with acls installed and any moder file system supports acls, you just need to enable them by adding a mount option in fstab, so I wouldn't call this the most difficult step in configuring linux file server, may be that was true 10 years ago, but not now.
Then it takes about a whole afternoon to figure out how samba talks to the AD, and two user accounts to make sure that everything is set up properly. If you are a competent admin, you should have some idea how user authentication works in AD, so figuring out how replace w2k3 server with samba, should not be that big of a deal.
I don't really understand why you need gui, it's just another type of user interface no better then CLI, even in w2k3 you can pull a text file with AD configuration and edit it, also I've recently tried fedora 10 (after a long hiatus since fedora 4) and, for example utilities like system, and chkconfig leave lots of gui stuff in the dust, not to mention that fedora does have gui utilites for this, check out system-config-*, oh by the way, samba has got a web-based tool called swat, that does most of the work for you.
I also don't really buy multi-os crap, since with linux everything is really easy - for each physical server build a virtual machine with the similar settings, xen paravirtualized linux guest kick ass in comparison with vmware, upgrade testing server first, see if it breaks, and unlike windows, 98% of the time doesn't, then deploy.
Re:STOP THE PRESSES! (Score:1, Insightful)
It's an impressive uptime for Linux, too. It impresses upon me the suckiness of the administrator to leave a years' worth of kernel security bugs unpatched.
Re:whats it give us? (Score:5, Insightful)
That page you linked to hasn't had a major edit in two years or so, and it does not reflect the current best practices for setting up a simple Linux/Samba file server with AD integration.
Then what the fsck is it doing on the samba.org site? Why isn't it removed if not updated? You know, this IS one of the real pitfalls of Linux, whenever you're looking for a guide you're likely to find something that's two years old and may or may not be valid. If documentation sucks, documentation re-verification on newer versions suck even more. I bet that's 99% of the reason Ubuntu got their code names down the way they do, if you search for "active directory hardy", "active directory intrepid", "active directory jaunty" you're much more likely to get relevant hits than "active directory ubuntu" or worse yet "active directory linux".
Re:Why do you need a special OS to run a server ?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow dude, you're out there! First of all, there are a lot of people out there that value the straight forward setup approach that Microsoft often gives you for that high dollar. Of course when I'm running Oracle and spend many thousands on it I install it on a free OS but I certainly can't apt-get install Oracle.
Aptitude is great and all, but you're forgetting apt-get install apache-modssl, mod_mysql, php and the myriad of other things that usually have to get installed too in order to do anything useful with your webserver.
You also seem very misguided in the decisions that Bill Gates can make even though he no longer holds CEO or President as positions at Microsoft. He didn't do anything to which you give him credit for doing.
As for adding multiple cpu support, wtf? Why are you adding support to something that is universally supported in all camps and never required users to spend money to upgrade. Higher memory support was never a reason to pay for an upgrade as they always had the 4gig 32bit limitation. Windows 98 had trouble dealing with that amount of memory but that's because it handled memory like crap to begin with.
Furthermore, trivializing the differences between Windows does your cause no good as there have been plenty of upgrades on the Linux side that haven't gone so smoothly, as an Ubuntu user I can assure you the world is far from perfect and often requires time consuming research to troubleshoot issues that crop up such as why my Sangoma card won't initialize despite lspci showing the card and using matching drivers. In the Windows world I get a nice easy to read event log that doesn't require me to go trapesing through /var/log looking for something that will give me a clue as to the cause of the problem. As a side note Asterisk can be a real pain in the arse.
Anywho, those of us that aren't Linux only and aren't Windows only admins will continue to laugh at you and your poor attempts to attack something you clearly don't understand.
Here's a hint for you, Linux is not free, not by a long shot. Time to deploy new technologies with Microsoft has almost always been significantly faster than time to deploy new linux based services, note this does not state whether or not the deployment was better. That time costs real money and isn't worth a lot of people's efforts. Often times paying for something instead of developing a solution yourself is the smarter move and saves you money in the long run. Of course this is not always the case so naturally, use the right tool for the job. Sometimes its Linux, sometimes it's Windows. My main issue is grappling with which distro to use for which task. CentOS or Elastix for Asterisk is a hell of a lot easier than getting the whole rig running on Debian for instance.