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A Run Through Windows Server 2008 403

Posted by Zonk from the hey-nice-to-see-you-say-hi-to-your-wife-bye dept.
amcdiarmid writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Windows Server 2008 RC0 up on their site. It has a few good points, and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'. From the article's conclusion: 'Microsoft has used the time since the release of Windows Server 2003 very well. The new Server Manager simplifies system administration immensely. Unlike Windows Vista, whose new dialogues still confuse even experienced users, Windows Server 2008 makes the admin feel right at home and in control ... However, it's not all sunshine, either. Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly ... Microsoft also gets low marks for failing to include SSH support in the operating system. On Linux servers, working without SSH is simply unthinkable. At least the Redmond company includes its encrypted remote shell WinRS. However, secure FTP is still a missing feature. The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point where it is not even included in the Server Manager.'"
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A Run Through Windows Server 2008 More

A Run Through Windows Server 2008

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  • Of course it's slow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Farakin ( 1101889 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:14AM (#21128125)
    It needs all that memory for the new Windows Server Aero features!

    • Re:Of course it's slow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geeknado ( 1117395 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:19AM (#21128171)
      Obviously, you're joking, but actually Aero /is/ available as an optional install for Server 2008, according to TFA. Of course, so is a shell-only server, which I would've liked to have seen broken down a bit more. How're the command line management tools? Etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by blhack ( 921171 ) *
        I would be interested to see the CLI tools for server 2003 as well....I really can't imagine that they are as straightforward as the linux equivalents. To me it seems like linux feels like an OS that was meant for the terminal...you run xorg on it if you're a windows admin, or if you're using it as a desktop OS.

        Other than that (at least for linux) the command line is several orders of magnitude faster than the GUI to accomplish just about everything.

        I would REALLY love to find a guide on windows administra

    • Re:Of course it's slow (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:25AM (#21128257)
      If you'd RTFA, youd learn that Server '08 doesn't have Aero. It doesn't even have hardware-accelerated graphics support(By default) and renders the whole desktop in software. Sounds stupid, until you find your server's crashed because of bad graphics drivers. Server '03 EE is the same way.
      • Assuming 2008 is based on the Vista kernel, graphics drivers in Vista automatically restart when they crash, instead of BSoDing the whole machine (at least ideally)... nVidia's drivers for XP do something similar now, too (although they don't restart, they load default 640x480x4 VGA drivers instead, BLEH).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by klui ( 457783 )
        You're correct: default install doesn't have accelerated drivers. But you should get acceleration by running the installer in XP compatibility mode. For example, ATi drivers.

  • Wall building? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ktappe ( 747125 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:16AM (#21128143)
    Without SSH and SFTP, does it seem as if Microsoft is trying to build a wall between itself and Linux? To what end I'm not sure, but this is starting to seem deliberate.

    • Re:Wall building? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:21AM (#21128205) Journal
      Not Linux, but the rest of the computing world. Every other OS, including router operating systems like Cisco IOS, comes with ssh these days. Solaris has it. OS X has it. Cisco IOS has it (even their wireless access points have ssh). BSD of course has it. So does Linux. Microsoft is the only OS vendor that doesn't have an ssh server by default.
      • Well most other OSes aren't reliant on the GUI to do most tasks. You can do a lot on Windows via the command line with PowerShell, but most people still prefer to use the GUI that they're familiar with to configure servers etc. Also even if Windows did have an SSH interface to PowerShell, it still wouldn't be usable by Linux people because PowerShell is pretty different from sh. (You'd be more familiar coming to PowerShell from *.NET than from *sh)

      • Re:Wall building? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Stamen ( 745223 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @11:40AM (#21129467)
        And this is the fundamental problem with using Microsoft technology. You can argue about this or that, but the main reason I don't spend much time using it is because it limits my skills. If you learn Microsoft technology, then your are basically limited to Microsoft technology; because they so often refuse to use standards, and insist on going their own way. If you learn Unix technologies, your skill is transferable to almost every other OS except Windows.

        It's a brilliant business move by Microsoft, and the reason that IT people who work in Microsoft shops are so defensive of their technology. If their company changes to anything else, they will have very limited applicable skills.

        I personally work with OS X and Linux, but if everyone wanted to change to Solaris, I could care less, after a day of getting adjusted, I'd be back up to full speed.

      • Re:Wall building? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Kyojin ( 672334 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @11:53AM (#21129669)
        I almost prefer it that way. I'd hate to think what a pig's breakfast Microsoft would make out of an ssh server.

        It would be incompatible with every client except the new microsoft ssh client they'd release with it. It would be full of security holes until at least microsoft ssh server service pack 2. It would be unstable and sometimes require a registry setting to be manually edited, and sometimes not, depending on what order a seemingly unrelated update made its changes in. It would be integrated in to the os such that if the ssh server crashed, the entire os would crash. After enough people complained and enough law suits, they would introduce rudimentary support for non-microsoft ssh clients, but these would occasionally corrupt data. Then they would implement their own version of X forwarding. Not by using the pre-existing remote desktop connection code, but by writing an entirely new powertoy client and a server plugin. Horrible things would occur if one attempted to connect to a server that didn't support graphics forwarding when the powertoy was installed on the client. There would be no fallback option to overcome this feature. 640KB would be the maximum graphics memory that any single application could forward if everything else miraculously worked.

        Have I missed anything? Probably.

    • I don't know if they're building walls, but they don't seem to be building bridges.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jimstapleton ( 999106 )
        Of course their building walls, and definetly not bridges!

        Windows go in walls not bridges!

        And on that line, Linux is for Pirates! Because pirates, like penguins, are creatures of the sea. We BSD users... Are evil, except NetBSD, they are Pirates, as the pufferfish is a seacritter too.

    • Re:Wall building? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:24AM (#21128243)
      They want to differentiate themselves from Unix, in that you should never need such things. Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop. Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec. That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix," if I can be so bold as to reference my own handle.

      • Re:Wall building? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:37AM (#21128423)

        They want to differentiate themselves from Unix, in that you should never need such things. Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop. Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec. That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix," if I can be so bold as to reference my own handle.
        Right, Windows has never seemed to be CLI-oriented, there are a few tricks you use in there but for the most part they want you clicking windows. HOWEVER, I've also heard that Exchange 2008 has gone all CLI-happy. Now I know that you can create some super-duper admin scripts with Exchange 2003, using it to do mass import/export of addresses and other tasks that would be input-intensive if you had to do it by hand. You also have tools like that for dealing with user creation at the domain controller as well. But as I was told, even routine tasks are supposed to be handled from the dos box with no GUI equivalent means of invoking the commands. That all seems to be going dead against what's seemed to be the typical Windows design philosophy. Can anyone with experience confirm or debunk?
        • Goddamn year-as-version-number bullshittery.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rrhal ( 88665 )
          I'm pretty sure Power Shell was ment to address this. You can access all the same GUI methods and attributes through PS scripts. The party line is that now you can script any thing you could do with the GUI.

          • Much as I like some of the things you can do with PS, it is bloated and slow; it is the CLI version of Aero. After you use it a bit it seems like it's nothing more than a CLI that is layered on TOP of the GUI, not the other way 'round...I expect my CLI's to be fast and lean, not slow and massive.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by rrhal ( 88665 )
              I think that's a pretty fair assessment - but at least you can set up a script and walk away while it cranks on a few thousand machines.

              On a side note doesn't this all have the feel of reinventing X-Windows (at least in a way)?

      • Re:Wall building? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:38AM (#21128429) Homepage

        Does the fact that it's your handle mean you believe all that, or is your handle facetious?

        Because things like Windows not being command-line oriented has been a bit of a problem for years. Sure, it's great to be able to do things through a GUI if you want to, but it's also very good to be able to do things through a command-line if you want to.

        Take the focus on Remote Desktop for remote administration as an example. Sure, Terminal Services on Windows is a very nice tool. However, if I'm just going to copy a couple files around, it'd be less resource intensive on both the server and client end, as well as being less bandwidth intensive, to be able to do that through a remote shell.

        I know that Microsoft has done a lot to improve their command-line support for the sake of scripting and all, but Remote Desktop just isn't a replacement for SSH. It's another tool with different strengths and weaknesses. So Remote Desktop does not make it a "better Unix than Unix". If they want to create a better Unix than Unix, they should at least provide a good remote shell, at least as powerful and versatile as bash, that can be accessed from a wide variety of operating systems. Because that's something that the Unix world already takes for granted.

        • Oh I think Gates was completely off his rocker when he said NT 3.1 was a better Unix than Unix, and I think that the direction they've gone in is totally misguided. I was just pointing out that historically, the Windows model has not been stream oriented the way *nix is, and that SSH or shell oriented stuff in general is really about streams (the power of Unix shells, in my opinion, is the ability to pipe the output of one program into the input of another).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yaruar ( 125933 )
          Even the exchange 2007 gui uses powershell commands for administration. And even then they have designed it so you can't do all the admin through a gui, you have to use the cli to get the full functionality.
          It's going to make scripting for exchange a piece of cake with full native support for xml through the CLI too.
      • Then you run into a day where the retarded admins tie up both RDC consoles with disconnected sessions and your remote desktop console program broke and you're trying to get a remote admin tool working to kick out those sessions because the server's in a cage 40 miles away and telnet's disabled by default.

        Yea, RDC's nice. Until someone decides to leave their session without logging out...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )
          That's not the fault of remote desktop, but rather of microsoft's licensing model for it...
          If you actually license it for more users, you can easily have a lot more than 2 sessions. The limit of 2 sessions is totally artificial and designed to make you pay more.

          I often have lots of SSH sessions open, often to lots of different machines... I also have plenty of non interactive ssh sessions open, a number of non interactive scripts i have use ssh to tail -f logfiles or such, i believe gltail which was posted
        • mstsc /console read up.

          "This also solves the annoying
          "Terminal server exceeded the maximum numbers of allowed connections"
          issue we all know too well."

          or hey-
          shutdown -r -m \\server

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by pseudorand ( 603231 )
        > That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix,"

        I'm a Linux admin by profession, but to be honest, I agree with you. MS has come a long way and is as good as or better than Linux in many respects. (Plenty stable, better hardware support, easy to use GUI that works [Linux command line Just Works(TM), but GUI's are still second rate compare to Windows] giving it a financial rather than educational barrier to entry.)

        However, I'm not sure Mr. Balmer believes he's got a Better Unix than Unix yet, otherwise

      • But my mum told me to play nice... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WebCowboy ( 196209 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:36PM (#21130333)
        ...becoause everyone is different and special in their own way!

        Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop.

        Well, historically the rest of the server OS universe HAS bee command-line-oriented and script-heavy, and remote access has been through RSH, Telnet and then SSH when encryption and strong authentication were needed. Nonetheless, int the Linux/BSD/UN*X world there has been a good amount of effort to accommodate the "Windows way". We have VNC, tunneling xwindows over SSH, and yes, there are even clients for Citric and Remote Desktop freely available (and sometimes included as part of an OS distribution).

        Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec.

        But Microsoft? Nooooo. Microsoft cannot tolerate differences. It insists we all play the game by their rules and if we don't, they take their marbles and go home. MS doesn't want mixed platform to be easy--they want it to be possible but annoying. The hope is that they can leverage their total desktop dominance to infiltrate the pointy-haired-boss-managed server market enough to hit critical mass, where managers get annoyed at having to maintain two different sets of administration tools, procedures, training resources, etc.

        There is no technical reason whatsoever for Microsoft choosing one approach whilst barely acknowledging established practices. It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast. Obviously Windows IS capable, but MS consciously chooses to neglect such practices. SSH is part of the same problem--they could AT LEAST put in a proper SSH-supporting client fer cryin' out loud! A server would be nice too--not everyone wants to dedicate the bandwith for remote desktop connections. There are servers or other machines that require remote admin out in very remote locations sometimes, accessible only by low-speed cellular modems or packet radio. Remote GUIs at 9600 baud tend to be quite impractical compared to ssh, sftp and such. GUIs make a very poor interface for large-scale admin of, say large server farms and clusters.

        Microsoft's model might be a "better UNIX than UNIX" within some narrow scope, but Microsoft continues to suffer from severe tunnel vision. It takes them a long time to bring things into focus that aren't right in front of them. Microsoft could've put a more concerted effort into WinFS and Monad and componentised Windows and interoperability tools but it didn't. It had instead to make 3 major releases of .NET and make a sparkly, glassy 3-D GUI and elabourate DRM technology. Meanwhile, the REAL promising technology remain mired in the research department or stumble out barely half-baked.

        I'd send MS to the corner for its lousy behaviour.

        • Re:But my mum told me to play nice... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by IgnoramusMaximus ( 692000 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @01:35PM (#21131363)

          It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast.

          This is the part of my life as a reluctant Windows admin which drives me up the wall. Windows fanboy monkeys (yes, they deserve to be called that) believe that Windows administration is some sort of game where one collects obscure secret codes, arcane magical marbles and byzantine "Swords of Brain-dead Cutting" from hidden caches in beetween the lines of some half-assed MSDN article by some MS insider or to be passed word-of-mouth when social networking with their buddies, all of this of course undocumented, because otherwise they wound't be, well, arcane, obscure and secret - would they? Naturally, this is the very anathema of proper operating system design where documentation of all commands (or source code if that is unavailable or ambiguous) is always available on demand to the admin. And this inane attitude of course only entrenches in my mind my personal experience of Windows being an unmanageable, unconrollable, arcane pile of vile secret shit loyal only to its MS master which is bound to turn around and bite you on the ass sooner or later.

          Of course many admins, faced with this nonsense, opt for the "commerce" way and buy whole bunch of "add-ons" and "tools" for small fortunes to do but the simplest tasks which are made near impossible without either those tools, spending one's life parsing the MSDN Holy Scriptures line-by line or personally knowing some idiots who spend their lives doing just that.

          Its maddening.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Almahtar ( 991773 )
        SSH is not just command line. Check out SFTP, FreeNX (remote desktop over SSH), and SSHFS. Using just one open port, you can have full SSL encrypted remote desktop, remote file system mounting, ftp, and (if you so desire) command line access using ssh.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      Well, this isn't that difficult to understand, think of marketshare as the water level in a dam. If water is being artificially held back by a wall, you want to tear it down so the customers migrate to you. If you're artificially holding onto market share, you want to build walls so customers don't migrate away. Microsoft is still in basic monopolist strategy #1: Keep the market you have (desktop), make related markets work best with your monopoly (client to server) and prevent a mixed environment (server t

  • ... at 19 pages ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by trolltalk.com ( 1108067 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:17AM (#21128151) Homepage Journal

    > "and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'."

    19 pages - more pages to serve adverts. A few paragraphs on each page, and on "print" so you can't just read the whole thing in one page.

    Come off it - take away the pictures, and the whole articles is a couple of paragraphs. In-depth? For people who never read anything harder than a comic book, maybe.

  • Woah... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:19AM (#21128161) Homepage
    Windows Server 2008 takes up 10 GB of hard drive space.

    10?! What the hell's taking up all the space?!

    Perhaps there's a 1080p movie of Balmer chanting "Developers Developers Developers"

    • Re:Woah... (Score:4, Funny)

      by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:24AM (#21128237)
      that movie isn't too big, images don't change much frame to frame so there's high compression. But the chair flinging has rapidly changing background while tracking chairs, so that movie is huge.
    • Doesn't surprise me much, at least if they included a .NET application server. There are JEE AS's that are more than 2GB, and that is just the AS, not all the other stuff a typical server might have these days. So if this is an all-in-one package, you are looking at the entire OS, an AS, possibly a database server, and that right there could be several gigabytes.

      Not that that is an excuse, when I can run my web server with a 2GB hard drive and 64MB of ram without any trouble (though the Slashdot effect

    • Re:Woah... (Score:5, Informative)

      by man_of_mr_e ( 217855 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @11:26AM (#21129157)
      Both Vista and 2008 suffer from 'backup-itis', use a tool like SpaceMonger on a fresh install of either and you'll see that well over 50% of the used space is copies of system files (sometes 3 or 4 copies). This is all part of the "self-healing" bit, but I think it's a waste of space.

  • Not surprised (Score:5, Funny)

    by JK_the_Slacker ( 1175625 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:20AM (#21128181) Homepage

    Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly

    That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.

    • Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Funny)

      by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:40AM (#21128451)

      Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly
      That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.
      Wow, I think Jimmy Dean just got a new idea for a breakfast burrito.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LO0G ( 606364 )
      Especially when the OS doesn't use hardware acceleration for video rendering.

      I don't know this for sure, but I suspect it - after all, why should a server OS need to use hardware accelerated video?

      Someone above already commented on how it would suck if your server crashed because of a crappy video driver.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        A server shouldnt even have a video card...
        Physically entering the datacenter to do work on a server is stupid, and using a graphical remote management card is bandwidth intensive and slow and a quite unnecessary and ridiculous idea.
        All my servers use serial consoles and have for years... Each server is connected via serial to a central terminal server, to which i can connect using SSH and choose a serial line to connect to. From the console, i can interact with the OS and even interact with the firmware if
    • That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.

      It looks like Microsoft has already put Windows on the Atkins diet!

      By 2010 Windows will either suffer a heart attack, or it will be nice and svelte!

  • Multi-CPU machines (Score:4, Funny)

    by xaxa ( 988988 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:21AM (#21128197)
    "That would mean that a two-processor (=socket) license would allow the use of up to eight cores with current processors!"

    How generous of Microsoft!

  • did not seem that slow to me (Score:5, Informative)

    by COMON$ ( 806135 ) * on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:24AM (#21128247) Journal
    I have been running server 2008 on an old gaming machine with 1GB ram, a 512MB NVIDIA 6800, 72GB raptor drive, athlon 2200 as well. Been very quick and clean on the interface, customization options are nice. I was just about to slap exchange 2007 on it last night to test drive it and forgot it is 64bit only. But as usual I am dissappointed with the lack of ssh support. I will have to read the article to see what the forest changes are with 2008 as when I promoted the server there was no difference that I could tell between 2003 AD and 2008, but there was a note about 2008 forests being different or something like that.

    It does however make me wonder if my graphics card was pushing the speed of the interface, how am I going to justify to my department head that I need the latest gaming card for my server? I have been trying that excuse for years to no avail :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jeffy210 ( 214759 )

      512MB NVIDIA 6800
      And you wonder why the UI was snappy? Most servers don't have graphics cards anywhere near that size. Most have elementary 3D support and that's just because the current chip in it happens to support it. Servers aren't meant to be UI heavy.

    • It does however make me wonder if my graphics card was pushing the speed of the interface, how am I going to justify to my department head that I need the latest gaming card for my server? I have been trying that excuse for years to no avail :)

      From my experience with XP, a lack of a video card is the reason why Windows are drawn and refresh slowly (even moving Windows around the screen is painfully sluggish). All that goes away when I install the video card drivers and it switches from software to hardware

  • Double standards? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:27AM (#21128279)
    Now it is a problem if MS is not bundling software? Last time I checked, that was a good thing. At least it allows excellent third party products such as putty and pscp to thrive.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MMC Monster ( 602931 )
      Err... One would guess that a viable ssh is as necessary to a server as a TCP/IP stack is. It allows remote terminal-based administration. Didn't Windows create some sort of power shell recently? How are administrators supposed to use it remotely without ssh?

      (I really don't know. I am not an administrator and certainly don't know much about servers.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Yaruar ( 125933 )
        well, if you'd RTFA then you'd have seen it's replaced with windows remote shell. And i suspect you can execute remotely through powershell as well.
        and as pointed out by myself and others SSH is rarely, if ever used with windows servers.

  • Understandable. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:27AM (#21128285) Journal
    It is kind of explainable, given that most MSFT managers grew up in the era where WYSIWYG was the greatest thing since the sliced bread. They have always believed in GUI and never liked CLI much. So the tradition continues, less emphasis on anything script oriented and CLI oriented. Their idea of great script is a vbscript with its own GUI. We might not like it, but that kind of explains part of MSFT's way of working/thinking.

    Lacking support for ftp, ssh etc are some vague attempt to create "value" to the non portable skill set developed by the windows admins. If the sys admins develop these skills and could easily run either linux or windows, then the switching cost for corporations to switch from windows to linux will decrease. Since the maximum revenue MSFT can extract from its existing installed base is capped by what it would cost its customers to switch to an alternative system, this is a very rational business strategy to keep them following a straight and narrow road to Redmond. And let us not blame just MSFT for this attitude. It is the customers who should realize the value of reducing their switching costs and demand better support for ftp, ssh and other linux side expertise they have in house. If customers don't demand it, why would a profit centered corporation deliver it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yaruar ( 125933 )
      Well, apart from the move with products like exchange 2007 to use the powershell exclusively for their administration, all the gui does is execute various powershell commands and even then there is about 20% of the administration which can only be done from the CLI. I've not played with the server tools, but the 2007 shell is pretty nifty and one of the best designed shell scripting environments i've seen, even non shell people seem to pick up the syntax pretty easily.
      I have heard rumors that you can actu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        It does have the "core install" option, which claims to install without GUI...
        What it really does is set your default shell to cmd.exe instead of explorer.exe, so you get a graphical command prompt window instead of the explorer start bar. The GUI is still running and can you can still run graphical programs, but you dont get the windowbar or the file manager.
        Infact, with the core install these aren't installed by default.
        You still get some of the irritating animations and graphical shit.

        I want a pure text

    • Re:Understandable. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RKThoadan ( 89437 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:51AM (#21128589)
      What's really strange is that the MS PowerShell is actually pretty impressive. It's a lot like most *nix shells except that it passes objects around instead of strings. It feels vaguely similar to Interactive Ruby to me. There are actually tasks in Exchange 2007 that can only be done in the shell (not in the gui) and many tasks are easier in the shell. They've even mimicked most of your standard bash commands. It knows what ls, ps and man are (among others).

      It appears to me that MS is quite committed to letting people run gui-less servers now, and their doing a pretty decent job of it so far. They're doing a lot better job of that than they are with Vista.
  • "Microsoft has used the time since the release of Windows Server 2003 very well."

    2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008...tick tick tick tick

    In contrast to all that dicking around BEFORE 2003?

  • Server Core (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Major Blud ( 789630 ) * on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:32AM (#21128355) Homepage
    I think one thing that needs to remembered is that 2008 will also contain "Server Core", which is essentially Windows without a GUI. I haven't played with 2008 since the early candidates, but I'd bet good money that a lot of the performance issues and disk space usage can be minimized when running in Server Core mode.
    • I wonder how you're meant to then apply updates to the machine?

      There are a few ways normally to get them:

      * Windows/Microsoft Update
      * Automatic updates direct from MS
      * Automatic updates from a WSUS server
      * Manually downloaded and installed (major hassle, especially for a fresh install)

      Also, don't certain updates require GUI interaction from the user? (from my memory Sharepoint had a gui installer that you had to faff around a bit to install an update). Although a lot of updates you can install from
  • "Microsoft also gets low marks for failing to include SSH support in the operating system. The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point where it is not even included in the Server Manager."

    No problem - check back, say 2013...?

    I know that Redmond is paying bonuses for every article and press release shotgunned out during the release of Leopard, but this is one of the most blatant snow-jobs in recent history.

    "WS2008 really sucks and all, but it doesn't totally TOTALLY suck,
  • Check out the section on file transfers. It's considerably faster than Win2k3.

    • That will only hold true under certain conditions. Namely, lots of smaller files. This increase in speed is mostly a result of a slightly improved protocol, not any magical internal updates. SMB2 allows for multiple requests to be given in a single request, which cuts back on chatting between transfers. So for transferring your movie collection for instance, the difference will likely be rather small.

      Also of interest, Samba also has support for SMB2.

  • Built on Vista?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by myxiplx ( 906307 )
    According to the article, server 2008 is built on Vista and includes product activation. o_0

    Well that pretty much guarantees it's not coming on this network any time soon.

  • SSH (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Almahtar ( 991773 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @10:37PM (#21136739) Journal
    Mod me down, whatever... I can't believe how many well worded and legitimate complaints about the lack of SSH support got modded troll. We're talking about lack of both an SSH client and server. These are basic tools for an admin using most servers. I'm really surprised that even on /. a person saying "Come on, no SSH?" would get modded troll. That's a legitimate complaint. SSH is essential to my operation. If I bought ANY server OS that didn't support it out of the box I would seriously question its credibility.

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