My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

You can add all of that easily. Printing hostnames or turning text to CSV isnt a hard job on any computer. I was doing this in the 90s on Windows, years before Powershell. And on pre-OSX macs (think System 8 and 9) connected via AppleTalk. So modern Linux systems are clearly not going to struggle in that regard.

And you’re now just doing exactly what you criticised the author for: making up bullshit requirements based on what you’re familiar with and then using that as some lame excuse to call everything else garbage.

> ssh can't connect to multiple servers at once (other tools like multissh can). However, most such tools aren't designed for and aren't capable of scaling up to a thousand or more servers.

You’re making distinction that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter if you’re spinning up multiple SSH sessions from one program, or multiple programs each with a singular SSH session. It’s still the same number of outbound network connections (and likely same number of processes too).

What matters is how those connections are managed. And the code I exampled does run those connections in parallel.

> Windows PowerShell and WinRM can

Bash can. It just needs to call a process. Just as PowerShell is calling a process to do it.

Saying SSH cannot whereas Powershell can is comparing apples to oranges. SSH isn’t itself a shell, it’s a secure client/server protocol that allows you to run remote code inside a pseudo-TTY. Generally that would be a shell, but it doesn’t have to be.

(Source: I’ve written multiple shells for both Windows and Linux over the years)

> yet people like you just blindly dismiss it,

That’s not what I did. You’re now making assumptions about me. Ironically “blindly dismissing” my comments in the process.

> assuming that it "must" be worse than Unix/Linux,

I dont need to make assumptions. I have a hell of a lot of experience managing Windows systems. 25+ years in fact.

I’ve also written plenty of server side software for Windows too. And network enabled Windows malware (pre-NT4 college network. I mostly just used it to siphon off other peoples quotas from the college ISDN line. But it taught me enough to earn a career in IT)

> since everyone knows that Windows doesn't even have a shell!

Literally no one said that outside of the article.

Windows clearly has several shells: explorer.exe, cmd.exe, Powershell. Plus lots of frontends for remote services via RPC.

I also credited RDP as being excellent too.

> To quote the original article: "there was nothing to lean back on: no shell"

I’m not the author of that article so I don’t really understand why you’re using that to prove a point about my own ignorance.

> Windows has a shell, the author of the article just wasn't aware of its existence, let alone its comparative feature set.

We aren’t talking about the article though. We were talking about your generalised point that Windows is easier to administer than UNIX-like platforms.

If truth be told, I stopped reading the article after about 3 paragraphs because it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t a well thought out piece. But that doesn’t mean I agree with you any more than the author. You’re both at the extreme opposite ends of reality.

To get anything done I have to get Safety, and Compliance, and Marketing, and Sales, and Project Management, and Vendor Management, and Product Management, plus the Product Dev Team, plus any sister Dev Teams, plus QA involved. Also gotta check with Security, and confirm our Infra team can host it.

Inevitably these people will have their own things going on and may not be available. They will have to wrestle with their own complexity. This leads to meeting after meeting. Then there will be paperwork. A lot of it. Maybe I don't need most of those teams involved but I need sign-offs about that.

Plus each of those teams is there for a reason. If I ignore Compliance we get sued -- and each lawsuit is going to cost a lot more than the cost of those meetings. If Marketing isn't involved then the product launch will screw up and the offering won't go anywhere. If QA isn't there than the product will suck, or maybe screw up catastrophically.

Even if every single manager, every single C-level, every single team lead and Sr., is a bonified genius, it's still going to be a mountain of lame, pedantic work. If there was a way to ditch that then I'm sure, somewhere, one of these MIT Berkeley Disrupter-types would have done so, but the reality is that's how any org larger than like 100 people is going to work.

You keep saying that as if there’s no such thing as secure automatic authentication on SSH yet people have been doing exactly that since before AD was even a thing.

> Three "Linux admins" failed at this task, and I had to resort to using ChatGPT and then fixing up the result by testing it against a dozen VMs that took me a day to spin up.

You do realise that you can get bad Linux sysadmins as well as bad Windows administrators?

Plus it’s not really fair to compare managing different distributions to managing a Windows (unless you’re counting Windows 95 and CE as part of your fleet). Most businesses standardise on one Linux distro (or BSD flavour) and only diversify from that if that absolutely have to. It’s not because Linux is harder than Windows. It’s because managing multiple different core stacks is harder regardless of whether that’s Linux and Windows. Or Linux and BSD. Or Windows 95 and Windows XP. Or different base distributions of Linux.

The first rule of managing large fleets of servers is homogenise as much of it as you can.

Take shocks coming down, going up, sideways and to keep the ride smooth for as long as possible.

I also saw him stand up for the team when needed.

He got kicked out of his job. Along with the whole team.