Totally offtopic and long: was Re: [bf1942] RE : RE: [bf1942] RE : Re: AW: [bf1942] Where can i DL

[Dark Bobo]

you started it =)

k, I had this discussion on /. with someone too. And as a linux admin in 
a Windows shop, I think I am qualified to disagree with you.

Uptime: In our environment, the only boxes that even come close to my 
linux servers' uptime, are the Oracle boxes. The reason for this is that 
they are never touched without an outage request, three months in 
advance, signed in triplicate by every manager, etc ad nauseum. This 
means that they are also -not updated- properly. Why? Because we can 
never be 100% sure that an update won't hose something seven ways from 
Sunday. Meanwhile, I happily, and for the most part, automatically, 
update my linux servers every week...more often if something critical 
comes up. How is this possible? Because I don't have to reboot the 
machine every time I change something as simple as a couple of network 
settings. Win2k is far superior to previous version, I agreee, but have 
you read your EULA for SP3 or XP? I mean really read it? omg...that's 
such another nasty discussion I won't even go into it here.

Dumbing down the install: Just like anything else, it's all in the 
admin. With RH being open-source, I have the ability to create a 
kickstart install that allows me to pop in a floppy, boot the machine, 
set the network info (unless it's DHCP, then subtract another minute), 
and ten minutes later have a working server/workstation. My tweaked 
install is less than 400M, and there's probably a whole lot more things 
that I could tweak to make it smaller. I install only the things I need, 
something that you can't do 100%, irregardless of your knowledge level 
with Windows. On top of that, you never know 100% what those updates are 
doing to your machine. MS-bias aside, that's fact, and every Windows 
admin knows it. Any Windows admin that updates his boxes without 
pre-planning it is nuts and will have outages. When outages cost 
anywhere from $1k to $5k per minute, that adds up pretty friggin quick.

shorthanding Windows:
Exchange: I had to set my linux mail servers, which also serve as the 
backup MX servers for our production mail, to 2 concurrent threads, 
because when our web servers started throwing errors, the Exchange 
server would choke and die on the influx of mail. I'd be more than happy 
to shut off seti and show you some sa reports of my machines happily 
chugging away at 70-120k emails/day running less than 1-5% utilization. 
These two boxes, one at each data center facility, both have uptimes in 
excess of a year, are Dell PE1550s with dual 1g cpus. Our Exchange 
configuration is a dual PE2650 setup with one server as a front-end and 
another to hold the mailboxes. These are dual 2g Xeon boxes with 2g of 
ram, plenty of horsepower for -email-.
Active Directory: Alrighty, lets take something perfectly simple, like 
LDAP, and break it! I'm not sure how you think AD makes the end-user's 
life easier. But, it makes the admin's life miserable. AD on DNS: the 
whole "multi-master" replication sucks. Serial numbers on the zones 
-never- match. In the real world, that means it's -broken-. AD on 
directory services: RR and SRV records, whooptie...LDAP's been around 
for a long time (see Novel ZEN, also not my favorite thing in the 
world). You wanna talk security, let's talk SELinux. Something the NSA 
helped develop and the commercial OS vendors were so afraid of they had 
to whine to congress.
Summary: We don't have to "shorthand Windows", MS does that all by 
themselves.

Support: When is the last time you actually opened a case with MS? 
First, you are either paying a buttload every year for your support 
contract, or you pay ($245/incident(?)) for each call. The last time I 
had a linux question was about postfix. I lurked on the postfix-dev list 
for a while after digging thru the documentation without answer. Posting 
my question actually got a response from the developer himself (Wietse, 
same guy who did Satan) within a couple of days. All-in-all, not a bad 
deal seeing as how it was free (minus the cost for my time).

The point of this rather rambling tirade is that if you're already 
willing to admit that putting unprotected Windows boxes on the -outside- 
of your network is a bad idea, why would you want to put them on the 
-inside-?  This is where we digress off into security-in-depth concepts 
and that wacky paranoia talk you always hear from the local security 
weirdo. But that's another topic for another rant...

Rick


cuban wrote:
> I can't help but to respond to this nonsense. Sorry everyone.
> 
> I'm an avid linux AND windows user. If you are getting "random" blue
> screens in windows you don't know what the hell you are doing. Windows
> gives plenty of data as to why.
> 
> This very machine I'm typing on (happened to be working on my server)
> has an uptime of 3 months (since SP3 came out). Basically, if you say
> Windows is for amateurs then you haven't used the more advanced
> features. Active Directory is amazing; it makes life on the end user
> VERY simple, which in the end... is all that counts.
> 
> I wouldn’t recognize and easy to use distro? Man, I think RedHat dumbs
> some things down worse than Microsoft.
> 
> All I'm saying is don't shorthand Windows, in a business environment:
> Active Directory kills any other form of centralized logon, Exchange
> kills Sendmail (if you say otherwise, or complain about resource usage
> you aren't sure of all the features it provides), and NTFS ties into AD
> perfectly.
> 
> Though on the internet, I would never even consider using a Windows box.
> I still have my dual homed sendmail box forward all my email to my
> exchange server. I would never put an IIS server up, nor msSQL either
> (at least not for public access)
> 
> 
> Just my two cents, but we shouldn't clutter this mailing list with
> anything but BF1942 linux questions. Not that there could really be any
> ;).
> 
> cuban
--heavy snippage--

-- 
Cardinal Rule of Technical Support, which goes thusly: "Verily, thou
shalt not take unto thine heart any words spoken by the Luser, for I say
unto thee, their mouths spout naught but untruth."