I just downloaded and installed Windows 2008 server. I am going to marry it.
Everything is so fucking simple to do. Terrorists could bomb your keyboard and you will still be able to stop them with your incredible account suspending abilities via mouse. For active directory / ldap based shit configuration is incredibly easy. Getting cygwin working on it properly was also quite easy. Windows 2008 is much like 2003 except that now it comes with some pretty interesting add ons for Active Directory. There is an add on for a HTTPS SSO that you can use in website development for authentication, which seemed pretty neat. Yet, the whole system has a very private feel about it. As usual it has stubborn old IIS.
Yet that is the problem using cygwin seems to solve quite well. Building Apache 2.2.0 is simple enough, and makes the system much nicer. There are also good Windows builds but using cygwin leaves the option of being able to add modules later. All Windows really needs is a BSD ports tree for this kind of shit and Linux is finished.
On Windows Server 2008 on the first boot it took me about 30 minutes to have DNS, DHCP, BOOTP, Active Directory, Deployment Services, and L2TP running. Cygwin took a while after to download and install, one could just keep a tarball of c:\cygwin for multiple servers. All this that quickly is impressive and feels deliciously lavish even with the sacrafice of 'total control' (you know, like how you have 'total control' of the downstream Linux devs) over the system it seems worth it for small and medium sized networks.
Also I think it makes a joke of everyone here about seven years ago including me there is also a feature for BIND secondaries under the Windows DNS server.
<3 Microsoft.
