Re: The MS platform is pretty robust these days, but it only takes one bad Apple
>I think the first twinkle of change began with Win2k. At least when it crashed, I could restart the explorer process. Woo hoo! Then XP came along, and I was actually very impressed with it’s multiple display capabilities. I became a sysadmin shortly after that. It was then that my eyes began to open. You’ll never really fully understand the power and flexibility of the MS platform until you’ve played with Group Policy Management in a domain environment. It’s only then that the tip of the iceberg reveals itself to you, and you begin to understand the point of the registry, and what all these “useless” services running in the background are for that you keep disabling.
UNIX has had GPO-like functionality since the dawn of time, before Windows had TCP/IP. Not only that, but you can control anything, any piece of software written to run on the platform. AND, you can do one thing GPO cannot, and that is control configuration files. Remember, on UNIX, everything is a file. You can configure push/pull, shit, you can even version control your settings!!!!! Diff, patch,merge, how do you do that in the wonderful world of GPO ?
Now you have puppet, and that is not even the same league as GPO, because it supports WAYYYYYY more features for Windows clients than GPO, supports "almost" anything out there - go look at the modules. https://forge.puppetlabs.com/
>Even back then, it began to dawn on me that as long as you worked professionally, the MS stack was the least of your worries. The first warning shot was Firefox. Yes, when you compared them on a technical level at that time, Firefox was faster, more secure, and had more features. What it didn’t have was central management. You couldn’t even define the home page centrally, let alone restrict what plugins it could use, and this factor proved more important than any other, especially when you had over a thousand school kids hammering away at your security, visiting dodgy sites.
Again, you cannot control Firefox out-of-the-box with GPO because GPO cannot control configuration files. You can hack Firefox pretty easily so it reads stuff like site whitelists, homepage, etc from the registry, even use the IE whitelist, homepage, disable individual plugins or disable all plugins altogether. etc it is pretty easy, if you know JavaScript.
Firefox was designed for UNIX.
>Historically, Unix may have been a superior network platform, and hence the various ‘nix flavours had a technical advantage, but this means diddly squat in the real world. Where is Samsung’s version of WSUS, to alert me that the smart TV hanging in the foyer is unpatched, and could pwn my network at any minute? Or the HP printers? Or the Canon Scanners? Or the Linksys access point the sales team bought with their own budget?
Who in their right mind plugs a smartTV into their network???? As for printer and scanners, in UNIX, the printer driver is a ppd file, no 500Mb download that takes 3 reboots to install. SANE does a pretty good job at detecting scanners, from my experience at least. Besides, on UNIX, when you use the repos, which you do 99% of the time, ALL SOFTWARE IS KEPT UP-TO-DATE, and Linux 4.x means that you no longer need to reboot, even when you update the kernel.
In UNIX, what would be considered server software is available in the repos, comprised in your support contract, if you need one, such as databases, diverse servers (mail,) ... you can even have all Linux/FreeBSD boxes use your own repository, an intern can set that up in 5 minutes (not including download time, largely depends on which software you want in your repo).
Now, go back to your crayola, please.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
