Posts by Tabor

No Choice but Windows 8?

Re: No Choice but Windows 8?

As others said, if you want you can still get Dell machines with Win7.

However: my primary machine is an HP laptop. Beefy, though (quad i7, 20GB RAM, large SSD). OS : Win8 (clean install). On this I have had running, simultaneously, my default applications, and a virtual test environment that combined 2 Windows 2012 servers (1 as DC combined with SQL 2012, the other as backup DC and Exchange 2013) and 9 Windows clients (3 XP, 5 Win7, 1 Win8). I have even had 2 additional XP vm's running on a usb3 disk. I haven't had any performances issues whatsoever, all of the vm's are default installs with indexing enabled. Granted, it's not terrible fast, but the client vm's don't run much slower than your average 3 year old desktop.

I'm not a developer, and I haven't really done extensive performance testing (so Exchange and SQL weren't under heavy load), but I am curious to know why you think the live tiles would "steal" that many cycles ? AFAIK, that would only happen when you have "live" tiles (which I don't), and are in the TIFKAM interface (which is practically never in my case). All the auto-update stuff is disabled too (including Oracle/Adobe and other third party stuff), but those things will steal cycles on any Windows version.

So please enlighten me : is your problem with Dell, with Windows, or what ? If you want to know at all times what your machines are doing, skip Windows (and most Linux distro's too nowadays, every recent OS does stuff in the background with a default install).

Gone

Wow. Check title of article please. Unless, of course, you use an AS/400 (or iSeries, or System i, or whatever it's called nowadays) as a Desktop OS. In which case : my hat off to you, sir.

They're not as secure as you might think by the way. It all depends on how they are set up. I've been in close proximity to the buggers for the last 15 years, in that time I've seen a couple that were quite happily functioning as open SMTP relays. Not many, but then again there's not that many of them around compared to the others....

Inherently secure ? No. But hard to beat on reliability (and price, but not in a good way)

Re: Probably the least used

@GreyGeek77: I don't really see how you got from Windows being the most interesting target (due to the install base) to "proportional to market share". Nobody ever stated that is was proportional. I do agree that Linux might be inherently more secure than your average Windows box, but a lot of that is due to the fact that Linux users are in general more knowledgeable than the average joe. And Joe just luuurves clicking "OK", "Yes", "Continue" to get what he wants.

And, though it saddens me, many people just don't want Linux. Case in point : after cleaning out our IT storage at the place where I work, we uncovered about 30 working machines (desktops and laptops). Old, but in good working order. We could have just have had them "processed" through proper channels (i.e. wiped and recycled), but me and the lads decided to do the wipe ourselves and install a clean (though insecure, because no disk encryption, autologin and weak password) Mint on them, and donate them to schools and charities. 25 of these are still looking for new owners.

Off-topic : I assume the 77 in your nickname refers to your age, not to your birth year ? If not, I should be greyer than you. Then again, if you did RH 5 in 1998... that might explain things :-)

Making the case for upgrading from Server 2003

Re: SMB

Well, you are right : I do like Windows 8. I also like Brussels sprouts. In both cases I would never consider anyone not liking what I like to be a "short-bus loser".

I have exactly 3 Windows 8 clients on the network (and no plans whatsoever to roll out), so I wasn't really considering SMB3 for that. I was considering it for traffic between servers over a high latency (around 200 ms roundtrip) WAN link. I'm guessing the upgrade from 2003/2008 in that case would be a Good Thing here.

Re: SMB

Ok, valid point. I was referring to the guys that rdp into a dc to manage ad, into another to manage dhcp and so on. I would assume though that you rdp in over vpn ? Genuinely interested, I would think that you don't just set up 3389 forwarding on a firewall.... allthough, sadly, many SMB's still do this (combined with no-ip or dyndns).

I could argue that a lot of mmc add-ins to manage 2012 still work on Win7, but I won't since there is AFAIK no official support. I could also argue that, if you bite the bullet, server manager on Win8 isn't half bad to manage both 2008R2 and 2012, and might even make your life easier. I won't, since my colleague on Win7 has the same issues with TIFKAM as you do.

I do agree that it's a damn shame that Microsoft does not make the 2012 RSAT available on Win7. I'm hoping against hope that they'll do an "xbox one" on that.

That being said, I was hoping that you could enlighten me regarding performance of SMBv3 vs SMBv2 (in a DFS scenario) over high latency WAN links. My tests show improvement in both access speed and bandwidth, but I'm curious about real-world usage scenarios. And my tests are just that : a 2012 guest vm/dfs host/rodc (forest trust) on each side, with guesstimates on performance. After all, I have limited time since I also have to deal with licensing for MS/VMWare/Adobe. On 2 continents. In separate contracts. I've read your articles here and on your blog, so I assume you can feel my pain. To be fair : I have quite a good relationship with both Adobe and MS where I live, and they do help out where they can. But unfortunately the good MS guys (even from sales) are limited to their region, cross any border and you're back to square one.

SMB

No, not Small and Medium Business (my day job allows me to ignore those, though my "evening job" does not), but SMBv3. For file shares, the kind that need to be accessed over high-latency WAN links, the DFS/SMB3 combo seems a huge improvement. Not based on real world usage though, just some firsts tests. Actual deployment : we'll wait for R2, though we have a couple of 2012 servers running for file/print, AD and DHCP/DNS.

I agree with a previous commentard, UI is not really an issue on the server side. If you have multiple servers, using RDP to manage them seems odd.

As far as the Eadon thing goes: he'll be happy to know that, after cleaning out the storage department and finding 50 or so still working desktops/laptops, we installed Mint on them and will be donating them to schools in the area. Which will probably have a bigger effect on Linux adoption among "users" than his comments here ever did.