I've just added a new page to the informational section of my site entitled Operating Systems. It is meant to give a brief comparison of benefits of the major operating systems used on Internet servers. The page is at
http://techcellence.net/information/operatingsystems.htm

If you have any comments on anything you feel should be included, or find any errors, please let me know.

I am waint for the flame war Linux vs BSD, and Unix vs Windows
:D

Well Duster, I certainly know who NOT to come to if I need any assistance or advice on Windows NT/2000, you review is definitely something that has been slapped together in a record time:

Quote:
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Windows NT server and 2000 server
There are so many problems associated with Windows, it is difficult to find any advantages, especially with better operating systems available for free. It is a licensed, closed source operating system. Many features native to Windows servers, such as being able to run Active Server Pages (asp) can be duplicated on Linux servers. Memory management issues and a barrage of security vulnerabilities are just a few of the disadvantages of Windows based servers. Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is the built-in Web services of Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows 2000 Server.
---------------------------

Originally posted by Walter
I am waint for the flame war Linux vs BSD, and Unix vs Windows
:D

You'll be waiting a while then. I'm sure that everyone knows that BSD is so vastly superior to any alternatives that there is no point arguing about it.

Now, if you said FreeBSD vs OpenBSD...

Duster, Im also guessing that you overlooked the following statistic:

Netcraft.Com:
it would be fair to say about 50% of public Web Servers world-wide are run on Microsoft operating systems

oH NO .. another holy War:bomb:

I'm glad to say that I luv them all , be it windows - linux - bsd - or any other unix flavor.

You might want to change the bit about asp being duplicated on linux servers because software like chili asp is no where near as good as having asp on win nt/2000.

Maybe you could add a bit about what control panels there are for each operating sytem?

So far the comments made have been as useful as trying to get milk from a bull. If you have something constructive to say, as I asked for, please say it. Otherwise, you can keep your opinions to yourself.

That page is not linked on my site yet. Some people have a much greater knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks of operating systems than I do and I am asking for any constructive suggestions to ensure accuracy and proper coverage of the topic. if you aren't able or willing to provide assistance in this area, then your comments are unwanted and useless.

If you don't have anything helpful to say, don't say anything.

"Lies, damn lies and statistics" S. Clemens

The entire article xtstrike was quoting out of context can be seen at http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ It is irrelevant since differences between operating systems is the topic, not the market penetration of each.

Thanks, Alan. Your comments (which were not there when I made my earlier post) are exactly the type pf help I was seeking. I presume you've used ChiliSoft and are speaking from experience.

I don't intend to cover control panels, though thanks for the suggestion.

Your Windows review there makes the whole page look like a pre-biassed affair. It probably is, but I figure you don't want to make it look that way :D.

Perhaps you could mention some of the unique technologies of Windows servers - ColdFusion and ASP for example (I'd be seconding Alan that Linux ASP is not nearly as good as Windows ASP).

Windows is also more user friendly than Linux - at least on the general usage front. I guess that perhaps Linux is actually more friendly on the server-specific front (that probably comes down to what you want to use them for, if you're using a lot of CGI, Windows NT is obviously stress material).

Windows systems tend also to be more coherent and consistent. Open source systems tend to be a little "bitty" because of the vast number of authors.

I also think you need to stress that there is no BEST operating system, and that it is important to assess your own needs and choose according to them. Newbies tend to fall for that "what's-the-best" syndrome.

Hi, I felt my comments are relevant since the quality of a product is directly related to the market penetration, if a product were as useless as Duster seems to make out on his review it would never have a 50% market share in the industry.

I also felt that they were constructive comments and maybe the article you pointed out could be linked to the review. From what I see you have nothing good to say about the Windows NT/2000 and this is false for the people that are going to your site for information. You should fairly review each product in its shortfalls and its advantages as you have with the other operating systems except Windows NT/2000

You say it is difficult to find any advantages, yet so many people use it, WHY do they use it if they see no advantage of using it? maybe this is something you should point out in your review. You say ASP can be duplicated and therefore makes WinNT/2k pointless, what about the cost of something like Chillisoft ASP?

Memory management and vulnerabilities, ive had Win 2000 servers running for months on end without memory problems, maybe it was in NT but thats a different story. Infact, maybe you should have reviewed NT and 2000 seperately as they are in essence two completely different operating systems.

I have not once heared of a vulnerability for IIS and not seen a prompt patch release by M$ they seem to have patch release under control now as well as a central update location for these patches, could this not be an advantage of the operating system. It even tells you when it needs updating, lol

OK, now I know what you are all thinking. "XTStrike Hates *NIX" well I have a Dedicated RedHat 7 server and I love it, I wouldnt exchange it for anything Apache is great, the system is highly configurable, almost all software installed is free, I dont quibble with the *NIX section of your review, its good, its the shortsightedness of your Windows NT / 2000 review that bugs me more than anything.

If you need any assistance in writing the Windows NT/2000 portion of your review to reflect at least the popularity of the OS and WHY it is so popular then feel free to ask me or others on the board for assistance.

Other that that, I will congratulate you on the review and look forward to re-reading an extended version with the recommendations you receive from this board.

Originally posted by xtstrike
Hi, I felt my comments are relevant since the quality of a product is directly related to the market penetration,
Not true. Marketing accounts for that. McDonald's has the greatest market share in hamburgers, yet no one in their right mind would argue that they make the best hamburgers.

If you need any assistance in writing the Windows NT/2000 portion of your review to reflect at least the popularity of the OS and WHY it is so popular then feel free to ask me or others on the board for assistance.
It's not about popularity, it's about benefits and drawbacks.

Fair points Duster, but you still need to work on that Windows review. Windows does have some advantages, and I think rather than neglecting them you should address them, and dispute them if necessary (as you've done with the ASP example).

There are so many problems associated with Windows, it is difficult to find any advantages doesn't really cut it. I would suggest looking independantly at the problems and advantages, not cancelling the advantages with the disadvantages in your first sentence.

The other reviews seem good. When I got to reading the Windows one though, a whole lot of bias seemed to start flowing. It seems too opinionated, whereas the others a very much matter-of-fact. Not only that, it makes the rest of the reviews look opinionated too.

The best way I can describe it is this: I'm reading through the reviews, and they're all very informative and helpful. Then I get to the Windows one and start thinking "ah, so the truth behind this is that it's just another one of those biassed open source loving articles".



And for the record, I'm not a Microsoft lover, or a Linux or BSD lover for that matter. :)

Going off topic, I purchase McDonalds hamburgers because I enjoy them :D, I purchase Windows because I enjoy the experience it gives me, lol

Quote:
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It's not about popularity, it's about benefits and drawbacks.
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Correct, it is ALSO about benefits and drawbacks, as stated eariler in the post :)

How long before a modified review? :)

BTW Lawrence, I agree on all of the points you made

CONTRIBUTE OR KEEP QUIET!
I don't know why some of you have such a hard time understanding this, but I'm asking for contributions, not critiques.

Thus far, one person (Alan) has stayed on topic.

Don't tell me there are advantages to a particular OS, tell me what you think those advantages are.

If you can't understand simple English and need to be whacked on the head metaphorically, then try it this way, PUT UP OR SHUT UP! GOT IT NOW?

Duster, I dont see how you see posts by Lawrence and myself dont contribute to your document.
Do i need to copy every section you want into little snippets?

*Windows is also more user friendly than Linux - at least on the general usage front

*Windows systems tend also to be more coherent and consistent

*patch release under control now as well as a central update location for these patches

*in relation to *nix : the system is highly configurable, almost all software installed is free

ill go for more but just read the posts, you will get alot of "comments" (as asked) and "anything we feel should be included" (as asked)

.

grrr :rolleyes:

im not trying to be sarcastic or anything, but i just copied all of those comments out of the previous posts you just narked about, lmao :D

but hey, Duster, ur welcome :)

Hee hee.

To quote Duster:
"but I'm asking for contributions, not critiques"

In other words, don't tell him that anything he says might actually be incorrect. :angry: Just add something new.

But, to stay on topic, here's where Windows wins over Linux:

- Easier to use. More GUI-based.
- More familiar to non-techies (see #1).
- There are more Windows experts.
- ASP on Windows can control more aspects of the server (running other programs, getting server info. etc.) than can PHP or ChiliSoft's product.
- Users are more likely to have a Windows box at home. From WinME on, that means they can test things on their home box (if they're using the built-in IIS).

In contrast, Linux/*nix has the following advantages over Windows:

- More stable.
- Can run under heavier loads.
- Fewer published exploits.
- Not hacked as often (this is different than #3; it is a matter of motivation. Most hackers out there are running Linux and -trying- to take out Windows boxes...)
- To counteract the "more Windows experts" from above, *nix users typically know the operating system from the ground up, so if you go with a *nix shop, they are more likely to be hardcore, rather than someone who took a couple of night school classes.

Interestingly, the two camps are moving towards each other. The *nix people are working on user-friendliness, copying Windows interfaces/programs like crazy. M$, on the other hand, has vastly increased performance and stability of both the NT-branch OS's and IIS.

Cheers,
Chris

Here's some commentary I picked up some where along the trail. While I do not necessarily agree with all of it, the verbage does tend to be less emotional than most.


I don't want to engage in pointless "my OS is better performing than your OS" discussions because this is supposed to be a security thread about web servers, not OS. But you didn't research that remark well. Windows 2000 has a number of very low I/O primitives, such as support for asynchronous network and file I/O, and extraordinary multiprocessor support up to 8 processors (the 32-processor support is still weak). Using I/O completion ports all I/O events can be serviced in a completely asynchronous fashion by a minimal number of threads, thereby minimizing context switches and optimizing workflow. You can't seriously compare FreeBSD to that, because it doesn't support huge numbers of processors as well, and it doesn't include as mature asynchronous I/O.

And our company's own work with many UNIX variants and Windows 2000 on high performance servers suggest that there may be many reasons to hate Windows 2000, but performance is NOT one of them. For an application that lends itself to a purely asynchronous operation, like serving static web pages, nothing is going to go faster than a well designed Windows 2000 application. Just from an OS theory perspective, you cannot do better than a couple of threads servicing 1000 concurrent connections, and never blocking on any I/O operation. Any OS that can do that is going to be blazing fast, and I don't care whether it calls itself NT or UNIX.

Where Windows 2000 has a real weak spot is its internal complexity. Unlike UNIX, which can be internally understood, and whose administration can be simplified, Windows contains a number of features that make it inherently complex and almost impossible to fully understand even if you are a guru. The registry, for example, succeeds is making such an interwoven set of dependencies between so many different layers of the OS, system applications, and user applications, that it becomes almost impossible to understand all of the side effects from shutting down services that you don't think your application needs.

What I like about UNIX is the idea that I can follow a clear and simple set of guidelines for securing an application, such as:

- Do not run the web server as root; - Do not give read/write access to the web server's static web pages to the userid that runs the web server, - Do not run any other services on the box (except for secure ones like SSH) - Make sure the rest of the file system is secured.

You want to emulate such practices on Windows 2000 as well, but its internal complexity constantly hampers your attempts to do that. If you start to do the above, IIS starts to break because it wants access to many different keys in the registry, none of which are well documented. You start shutting off services, and now all of the basic administration GUI tools stop working. You shut off different parts of Windows 2000 networking, and the next time you go to apply a service patch it fails because the patch assumed basic services would always be running.

It just becomes an endless twine of detail, and it serves no purpose other than to prove than Windows 2000 is hugely complex undertaking of dozens of different teams, and that the system's underlying principles were more around "how do we make all of these things work together and work at all" and not "how can we make it simple for people to reconfigure these services and deploy them individually or in small groups of services."

At very least, I'm feeling that the registry as it was designed is an abomination, and one of the most grotesque pieces of engineering I've ever seen. The irony of the registry is that it was selected over the use of individual application files primarily so that you could secure access to individual registry keys rather secure access to config files at the file system level. But the size and disorganization of the beast has the opposite effect. Very few people understand where all of its parts extend, and you become afraid to secure anything, because ultimately you end up breaking other things.

I'm feeling a need to make life simple, or at least more simple.

Originally posted by xtstrike
Hi, I felt my comments are relevant since the quality of a product is directly related to the market penetration, if a product were as useless as Duster seems to make out on his review it would never have a 50% market share in the industry.


Not entirely true. . .

Recently I was shopping in my friendly neighborhood super-mega-hyper hardware store and commented to one of the managers about the poor quality of some of the products they sell. His reply: "We don't sell what's good, we sell what sells."

The product doesn't determine market share, consumers do.

Duster, I feel your post was nicely edited, but unfortunately you cant delete the post its self can you :cool:

I feel you noticed what you had said was "positive" of other users comments and that just isnt right, is it, lol it had to be deleted.

Anybody got a picture of the post before Duster edited it? or am I going to have to wait till I get back into work in the morning to pull up my cache? I guess so.

Aloha
windows clustering performance is very good and easy to manage

teamed with SQL hard to beat for sites making money on the web.

It would be interesting to see how much money websites make by what OS they use and what the costs are to maintain. might be something to try to research

xtstrike,

As a moderator, you should be setting a good example, not making sarcastic remarks and trying to provoke people. Apparently you haven't learned when to keep quiet. It's about time you did.

Originally posted by Lawrence
Perhaps you could mention some of the unique technologies of Windows servers - ColdFusion and ASP for example (I'd be seconding Alan that Linux ASP is not nearly as good as Windows ASP).

Not entirely true any longer, since ColdFusion now runs on Linux and is proving to be a wonderful alternative to running CF on Windoze.

I didn't see the review page in its original format/comments, so I can't comment on xtstrike's comments. However, my personal opinion : only a sysadmin who has properly used Linux and Windows NT/2000 in a commercial environment for a no. of years could fully justify his comments on certain systems.

[Withdrawn (voluntarily). All I should say is that Duster - you seem to be walking kindling].

Originally posted by BC
Not entirely true any longer, since ColdFusion now runs on Linux and is proving to be a wonderful alternative to running CF on Windoze.

Fair enough. Actually, I must admit that I struggled just to come up with those two - ColdFusion and ASP :) Is ColdFusion on Linux somewhat like ASP on Linux in terms of limitations though?

Hehe duster, go easy on him, hes a 'new' moderator.


Originally posted by Duster
xtstrike,

As a moderator, you should be setting a good example, not making sarcastic remarks and trying to provoke people. Apparently you haven't learned when to keep quiet. It's about time you did.

Duster, would you not feel in the same position as me?, I feel my comments were warranted, you being a long standing member and somebody most people on the board would look up to, you should not be going around deleting comments you previously made simply because you didnt notice what you were saying was true.

I cant get a copy of the item Duster deleted as my temporary internet files erase nightly, but it was something like:

"Thankyou For Your Useful Comments on the Article"

We all have our opinions, it just so happens yours are strongly biased, something which never makes for a popular review, never mind life goes on...