Thanks to pantso for good message. I got it. And I would tell exactly why I'm here, you said that majority of people here are educated folks and made their choice by knowing equally well both sides of the story. Look for next message in the thread where Stryker has little understanding about Windows and trying to say to me that you can not image copy Windows and you need to have a lot of clicks to make group policy.
Sryker, you can image copy windows and it's actually being used in my company (so I'm opposed to that). Moreover .NET server would be able to be installed using RIS services (if you don't know what is that then look it up). You can also boot from floppy connect to network and install Windows from network (it's been supported since WinNT 4). As far as client systems are corncerned then I would create RIS server, create Windows 2000 or XP image there and next time client boots it would be able to install OS directly from network WITHOUT USER INTERVENTION.
As far GPO is cornerned, yes you have to click, in UNIX you don't click becouse you don't have GPO, so how can you compare?
So you were implying that it can not be done, now seen that it can be done what is next?
About reliability. Majority of my servers are getting rebooted only for service packs. Last time I checked uptime on my SQL machine it was 179 days if I would not install OS services packs on that machine then it would be actually 1 year and 4 month, there were no crashes or anything else which affects it. The same goes for HTTP and FTP servers, they have uptimes in months and they are rebooted as well for hotfixes only. Reliability of windows is one of the things which people misunderstand the most and primarily judged by their experience with 9x systems and some bloated Windows installations when you have 40 different programs running on your machine which did not come with it which potentially replace system file, run under high priority and do all other nasty shit.
Also all what I mentioned are not specialized tasks, this is very common business requirement. Automatic installation of sofware, security on desktop, file system expansion, common desktop envirimont. Which of this tasks you think is not common?
And I'm not opposing to UNIX either. I would guess bind is still the fastest DNS server and I would use it if I would have a spare computer for external queries (I still would use Windows for AD DNS updates etc though). I like Linux becouse it's free as well. I'm opposing to glorifing this OS and selling it without looking at all sides of the story which clearly a lot of folks here do.
[ August 23, 2002: Message edited by:
http://www.unixsucks.com ]