Re: How To Abandon Microsoft

tomstdenis_at_gmail.com
Date: 09/26/05 

Date: 26 Sep 2005 04:50:36 -0700

Mxsmanic wrote:
> Hugo writes:
>
> > Just wait untill you have a few hours without much of a workload, and give
> > the instruction; no exactly hard ...
>
> Sounds like you've never had 40,000 desktops to upgrade worldwide.

If you have 40,000 desktops that must all be live and mission
critical... then you have a lot of thinking about past mistakes.

If they're just say, oh I don't know, work stations then you upgrade
one department at a time. Keep cross-platform tools up e.g. samba
shares for instance and go on your way.

> Upgrades can take many months in production environments.

Because you don't have enough staff. That's like saying it could take
a month to clean an entire 60,000 sq.ft complex ... if you only have
one janitor.

> > You must run a LOT of old out of date software then.
>
> No. I just have actual experience running large and small computer
> systems and networks in real production environments.

Running windows? Yeah no wonders you're so negative.

> > I work in the the telecommunications / carrier industry, in our industry
> > upgrade is essential for production environments.
>
> Upgrades are essential at some point in every production environment.
> But you do not perform them if they are not essential, and you spend a
> tremendous amount of time testing them and rolling them out when they
> are. Telecommunications is a special flavor of production
> environment, so the rules are slightly different in the details, but
> the same principle applies.

Granted and agreed. You don't need to update boxes for trivial fixes.
Though a careful [clonable] design lets you get away with quite a bit.

> > But what sort of person would run a single user operating system in a
> > network environment?
>
> A single-user OS makes sense on the desktop, even in a network
> environment.

Spoken like a true Windows pre-NT advocate.

single-user does NOT make sense. Think "user" + "root".

> > In Microsoft systems a end user can change the operating system itself,
> > just load some program or virus and suddenly the machine is destroying
> > data or some such nonsense ...
>
> Not when the machine is locked down. NT-based operating systems can
> be tightly secured.

And this is through ... MULTIPLE USERS.

> > ... all because twenty five
> > years ago Microsoft didn't understand that the world would one day be
> > networked.
>
> Twenty-five years ago, nobody understood that.

That's why UNIX is multi-user right?

25 years ago dial-up modems existed [just to let you know]. So it
wouldn't have been impossible to do remote logins (perhaps not over the
yet-to-be-vetted IP networks) but definitely direct-dialup.

Essentially "upgrades" are less of a worry in a proper setup. For
example, if I wanted to get fancy [and change job titles as I'm not an
admin but a cryptographer] I'd make EVERYthing of the setup based on
the MAC address.

For the normal users they would get no services running [outside of
NFS, samba, cups, autofs and ypserv], servers would run their own
respective operations, etc. Could roll it out as disk images for the
workstations and one for servers but also could just do one master
image per department so any box is interchangeable. That way when
there are critical [or otherwise important] updates to be had you just
roll out a disk image and the next time the machine boots it does its
thing based on the MAC address.

[of course things like filestores may be handled differently but in
reality that doesn't have to be the case].

Tom

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