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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.ysu.edu!news.radio.cz!newsbastard.radio.cz!news.radio.cz!CESspool!news.maxwell.syr.edu!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.easystreet.com!not-for-mail From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Newsgroups: alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD (or something else?) Date: 27 Mar 1997 08:50:36 GMT Organization: Cool Dudes Inc. Lines: 91 Message-ID: <5hdccs$7u4$1@easystreet03> References: <5hcbac$r22@news.gvsu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: sunnet.portsoft.com X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.6+ Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au alt.os.linux:19456 comp.os.linux.misc:166573 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37817 In article <5hcbac$r22@news.gvsu.edu>, behrensm@river.it.gvsu.edu (Matt Behrens) says: > >Goatboy (lcappite@sprynet.com) wrote: > >: > Those willing to give up functionality for ease of use >: > loose both and deserve neither. > >: What *significant* things can UNIX do that NT4 or 95 can't? > > >I'm positive many more people can come up with many more examples. In >fact, I'd like to see them. > >-- Microsoft seems to have a company policy against participation in the CERT listings. When crackers find the newest hole and all the other Unix vendors list either that it's patched or that their working on it your a lot better off than Microsoft's stony silence. It's too much of a pain following all the trade rags to find out about NT's latest security holes. NT also has no job control. With Unix you can modify priority of various processes, as well as killing off ones that have gotten bunged up. With NT, if the Win16 subsystem gets trashed, for example, you have to reboot. NT is very difficult to remotely manage. With Unix you can telnet into it and do your thing. With NT, you have to run a bunch of graphical tools, which means having a Windows machine, etc. For example, we have a server set up outside our firewall, I can telnet to the firewall (unix) then from that to the outside server (also unix) and do my thing. If the outside server was NT the firewall (it's a proxy firewall) would block traffic from the NT graphical utilities. NT also has a terrible password structure. Very few applications that are NT-aware are "domain aware", in that if they require userID validation they can query a NT domain controller for the userID/password pair. Mostly the ones that are are from Microsoft. (Like IIS and Exchange server) In contrast, Unix has NIS, which allows it to participate in a unified user authentication scheme that crosses Unix vendors. You can even get TACACS+, Kerberos and other central user validation servers for it. All support for fixing NT bugs originates from Microsoft. With Unix, if I run into a bug I can pay enough money to get ahold of source from the vendor that sold it to me (if they have no interest in fixing the bug) and get someone else to fix it. With NT, your stuck with what Microsoft decides. For example, a few weeks ago I added a second disk to our NT server. On bringing it up it blue-screened, and wrote out a dump file. I disconnected the second disk and the server came up fine. It took me 3 weeks to get any kind of resolution from Microsoft, and the best they could tell me was that there was a problem with the CPU cache on the motherboard, but that was just a gut feeling. They did have a copy of my dump file, and the engineer assigned to it told me that he had a number of developers look at it and they all had conflicting opinions on the cause. I swapped the motherboard with a second server I had that had the identical motherboard and the problem went away. This might point the finger to the motherboard - except - that the second server that I had that I swapped boards with didn't crash when I put the board into it from the first server. Guess what, the second server was also running FreeBSD. Now, this was all dealing direct with Microsoft, which I was able to do because we have a developers subscription with them which gives us X number of free incidents per year. If I had bought NT from a VAR, then I'd have probably called the VAR who would have made a few ineffectual suggestions then called Microsoft themselves. In that case it would have taken even longer. In contrast, most Unix VAR's at least have someone on their staff that knows C. I use both Unix and NT and NT is not such a bad server operating system, if your a small organization that has outside VAR's come in to do your networking for you because you cannot do it yourself. It's easy to find cheap "computer consultants" that can do NT, of course they may set it up all wrong but you will at least have something that works somewhat like the rest of your desktops, and you might even be able to pound into serviceability with enough effort and without really learning anything about how it works. But, it's not the sort of OS that you would want to consider for anything really serious, and even if you did decide to use it as a serious platform you need to do every bit as much learning about it as you do for Unix. SO, I don't see the advantage to saving time here that NT is supposed to have. About the only thing I can really say for it is that NT is much better than Novell NetWare, which is excretable in my opinion.