[vox] MS and Homeland Security

[ME]

> On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 12:32:37PM -0700, ME wrote:
>> After having been an NT Admin for Windows NT 3.5.1, 4.0 (Server
>> Edition),
>> Windows 2000 Advanced Server Edition, administering a small Citrix
>> Server
>> farm, and generally windows support, I can tell you that use of telnet
>> or
>> ssh to use cmd.exe as a "shell" for a windows server just does not cut
>> it.

Micah J. Cowan said:
> Who said anything about using cmd.exe? Use it together with Cygwin's
> bash.exe: that's what the URL above *says*.

Sadly, even using bash does not fix the problems of remote administration
tools in windows being primarily GUI based. (I will agree that bash was
better than cmd.exe though.)

We installed perl, bash, and many of the cygwin tools on some of our
windows servers. They made some things easier and possible through a
shell, but not to the level we needed. Did you know that early version of
MS IIS would not allow you to have dynamically generated pages call
applications to have them run? You cuold either have static pages that
would call apps or dynamic pages that filled in vars, but you were not
able to do both. (3rd party plugins later made it easier.)

>> And for those who state such a thing is not an issue, MS has stated they
>> think it is an issue, and they have plans to include support to
>> configure
>> most of their services with something like a remote shell that does not
>> need to be halted for upgrades. It is enough of an issue for MS to
>> conceede this as a failing ("failing" is not their word) by choosing to
>> offer support for this in future products.
>
> They could do this just by allowing all configuration to be stored in
> text-based files, and/or registry keys which are easily accessed via a
> supplied CLI tool (not terribly difficult to write). Then they can
> build the GUIs on top of those, and everyone's happy.

Hey! I would not be happy! :-P~~~~~          ;-)

Actually, they sort-of had a solution with the earlier windows (Win95) for
clients. The regedit tool permitted you to dump the registry into a
flatfile (text file with ".reg" extention) fro the command line. You could
then edit the flatfile with edit, and then re-import the registry from the
command line. This feature did not make it into the NT series (AFAIK) and
the size of the registry made this difficult to weild. Also, the threads
that continued to check the registry entries to see if a "Workstation
install" has hacked into being a "Server install" made importation of a
complete registry from ,.reg files difficult if not impossible from NT
land.

Linux makes remote administartion really work. Apple did Mac OS X all
wrong. Following the MS way in requiring administration via GUI tools has
hurt them. The normal config files are sometimes "there" but modifications
to them do nothing. (At least in the early OS X this was the case. I have
not looked lately. Do they still use NetInfo? On NeXT boxes you could at
least use command line tools to gain access to modify somme of the netinfo
while early copies of OS X had features that could not be changed from the
command line.

> My 2¢,

Oh yeah!? My $0.03! (Trying to be "odd" and make my content more
valueable.. heheh hehehheheh ehhehe. Chalk it up to "inflation.")

-ME