[ale] nice article in Sun World for the PHB's ;-)

[jeff_hubbs at mcgraw-hill.com]

That kind of mirrors my own current situation, albeit not my opinion of NT in
general.  Here, our "work" is done on VMS/Alpha and there's no cogent effort
underway to do anything else.  However, when our home office sent us a flurry of
new NT/Win98 desktops with zero administrative infrastructure, I built an Intel
box and put NT Server on it.  File/Print and user account and profile management
are its main reason to live, although fax serving will probably come up soon.  I
would have loved to have done it in Linux/Samba but I had more of a personal
comfort zone with NT, and we did have the NT license on hand, FWIW.

I think I've said before on the list that I'm not an NT basher, having
accomplished quite a lot with it over the past 4 years, but I need no
rabble-rousing regarding Linux' superiority in many areas - areas that really
count!  I'm sure, for instance, that my file/print sharing performance would be
better under Linux/Samba, but  more importantly, when I had a drive fail in a
RAID 0 stripe set over the weekend, NT not only freaked out and gave me partial
display lockups after I logged on, but it also actually broke a RAID 1 mirror
set in a different drive array on the same SCSI bus (I had to figure out which
drive had the newer dates on it, blow away the other partition, and rebuild the
mirror).  NT doesn't seem to have an analogue for umount, so it wouldn't boot
until the array with the bad drive was actually uncabled from the system, which
I thought was pretty stupid.  It was nice, however, to be able to make a RAID 5
set out of the four drives in that array after the bad one was replaced with a
few mouse clicks.

I figure that Linux will eventually acquire and improve on all the "usability"
features of NT and then some, and I'm not afraid to say that it's my own
personal limitations more than anything else that prevent me from getting any
more use out of Linux than I already am.  I also very much agree with Linus'
take in that AIIM (sp?) conference about how no one REALLY understands NT and I
feel like that's harmful.  The Linux kernel, OTOH, is comprehensible (maybe not
by ME, sure).

- Jeff





Chris Ricker <kaboom at gatech.edu> on 04/22/99 09:32:25 AM

Please respond to Chris Ricker <kaboom at gatech.edu>

To:   ALE mailing list <ale at ale.org>
cc:    (bcc: Jeff Hubbs/Tower)

Subject:  [ale] nice article in Sun World for the PHB's ;-)




Check out

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-04-1999/swol-04-idcnt.html

Key point:

<quote>

"Media reports often leave the impression that Windows NT is being adopted
by organizations of all sizes for every conceivable mission and that
organizations are abandoning their investments in other operating
environments," said Dan Kuznetsky, program director for IDC's operating
environments and serverware research programs. "However, when IDC shines the
light of empirical research on Windows NT usage, a different view emerges."

According to IDC, NT is used primarily as a departmental infrastructure
server, for things like file/print, messaging, and communications, rather
than as a major enterprise server running mission-critical applications. The
rest is just good advertising.

</quote>


later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                                  chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu