On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:55:14 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 10/8/2011 4:08, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I have yet to see a text file change on a Linux system that can hork
>> the system up as badly as Microsoft wants you to believe Windows can be
>> messed up with a single registry change.
> 
> echo > /etc/fstab

While it will create a problem with getting the system running, it's far 
from unrecoverable.

Windows Server 2000 as a domain controller.  If you lose your 
administrator password, you're hosed.  You're reinstalling. (I understand 
they fixed that oversight in Server 2003, but that's beside the point).

Had a lab full of machines that the power went out in once (electricians 
doing a power upgrade).  We shut everything down properly, they did some 
work, we powered everything up, and then they started their actual work 
and threw the main breaker.

Half the Windows machines wouldn't boot.  All the *nix and NetWare 
machines (and AS/400s et al) booted more or less without any issue at all.

>> Because with Linux it's pretty rare to have to reboot to affect the
>> change.  It's sometimes easier, but to this day, I continue to be
>> amazed at how frequently a Windows system has to be restarted.  Twice
>> during installation, and if you're applying system updates, sometimes
>> multiple times to get everything current (certainly with XP, later
>> versions are somewhat better).
> 
> Because nobody but Linux weenies care whether they have to reboot their
> system to upgrade their software?

It's an inconvenience.  An annoyance.  Something that's far too often 
required on Windows.  Yes, Windows weenies don't particularly care, 
because they've been taught not to care.  They've been taught that 
"troubleshooting" involves "did you turn it off and back on again, and 
when it came back up, did the problem recur?".

Sorry, *that's* not troubleshooting.  That's problem avoidance.

>> Trivial.  No scripting required.
> 
> These are relatively recent tools in Linux, you must admit. UNIX went 40
> years before getting such support, and only because it started to get
> targeted at less tech-savvy people.

Relatively recent being "in the last 10 years or so".  That's about 2-3 
technological generations.

I might as well name Windows faults based on experiences exclusively with 
Windows 3.1.

>>> If you wanted to do any of this with Linux, you would have a whole
>>> bunch of scripting ahead of you. Under Windows, it just takes a few
>>> button presses to set up. You just can't do it from the end-user
>>> versions of Windows; it requires a server OS. (Three guesses why those
>>> cost so much more.)
>>
>> Wrong, again on the Linux front.  I personally know people who
>> administer *thousands* of Linux servers.  I worked for a company that
>> has a product to apply updates on a schedule to remote Linux systems.
> 
> Is it included standard in Linux? ;-)

No, but at least one of the tools is a free tool to download and use.

> But yeah, this stuff happens fine in Linux. Probably easier in Linux
> than Windows, actually. I can't imagine the kind of operations Google
> does in their data centers working on something proprietary like
> Windows.

Indeed. :)

Jim

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