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Path: sserve!euryale!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!gwu.edu!seas.gwu.edu!dobrien From: dobrien@seas.gwu.edu (David O'Brien) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD... Date: 30 Jul 1995 19:54:51 GMT Organization: George Washington University Lines: 52 Message-ID: <3vgo2b$6vk@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu> References: <3uktse$d9c@hal.nt.tuwien.ac.at> <3us0rg$7ph@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> <3usrgl$9uk@felix.junction.net> <3utfha$3ll@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> <id.LFWL1.LL3@nmti.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.164.9.3 X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Peter da Silva (peter@nmti.com) wrote: : In article <3utfha$3ll@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>, : Jon Jenkins <jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com> wrote: : > NT is a direct competitor for UNIX and you have got to : > ask why use UNIX instead of NT? : UNIX is far less likely to fuck up and leave you hanging without a clue : as to why it's broken. Being able to see under the hood isn't just a : matter of enjoyment, it's an essential part of system management. Amen brother!!! When I took this sysadmin job a year ago, I was told I would admin Solaris and NT servers and workstations. After having admin'ed Netware, I figured NT would take about as much time and trouble. WRONG!!! I am now quitting this job just to get the hell away from NT. I spend 70% of my time with NT and 30% on Solaris. NT workstation is fine. It is great compared to MS-Windows. In fact, I will never use MS-Windows again. BUT, just try to administer an NT server and domain (the equivalent to a Unix NIS domain). In-freaking impossible! No diagnostics. No admin tools. The user interface to sysadmin tools is as dumbed down as everything else in ms-windows. Like Peter said, when you got a problem, you are just hanging. Using NT is letting Microsoft decided how to setup and run your LAN. At least with Unix, I have tons of configurations I can set to customize the servers for the way *I* want my network. Microsoft as some pretty f*cked up notions about domains. After a while, you really wonder if anyone at Microsoft has every used networked machines for over a week. A small example: The administrator under NT server doesn't have any permissions in user's home directories. MS thinks, "now why should an administrator ever be allowed permission in a user's home dir?" Now what do you do when your 6-gig server that had 2-gig free last week now has 200meg free? You want to do a little ``du'' action and find the disk hog. Wrong, remember?, you don't have read permissions. Time to fix this. So you pull up file manager, go into permissions. I'd like to do a little ``chmod +r'' for the administrator in the user's directories. Buzz, wrong answer. The tool only acts like ``chmod ='' (ie. setting the absolute permission, not just adding or subtracting a subset). Just great, can't change permissions on the user's dir or files without screwing up any other permissions a user may have given someone else. Phone call to MS on thier primium support line (you should see the companies yearly bill for this one...). The NT tech support guys are ok in general workstation and install problems, but administrating a server??? Surely you jest! BTW, I did finally find a hidden command-line program that comes with NT to do what I wanted. But you think dd or find has a weird syntax??? -- David (obrien@sea.legent.com -or- dobrien@seas.gwu.edu)