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Microsoft Announces Nano Server

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Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#91

Post by trentnelson »

nbevans wrote: post #85
trentnelson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows doesn't support hotpatching, Linux does, it really is as simple as that. Linux has more people working on it than the Windows kernel does, and is just a more advanced kernel in general at this point. Actually, hotpatching is easier on Linux because it has a technically inferior virtual memory subsystem to Windows. The Windows kernel is technically superior in numerous areas: virtual memory, thread synchroni…

I'm glad somebody pointed that out. It's infuriating listening to people who've only ever worked with Linux to a low level when they preach about how it is the most modern kernel bar none. The facts are really quite different. Dave Cutler, of Windows NT fame, is no slouch. He is every bit as good as Linus. Just without the petty attitude problems his far more popular rival exhibits.

Cutler is a f'n genius. He was 47 when Bill Gates called him up in the late 80s and poached him from DEC. He was one of the core architects of VMS and brought all his A-team with him to Microsoft. NT was engineered to be a high performance OS from day one, and it is evident throughout the architecture of the kernel and executive.

Linus was 22 and implemented enough system calls such that he could run bash, mocking a UNIX-like system, which, again, VMS ran rings around in the day.

Linux's success has absolutely nothing to do with technical superiority.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#92

Post by mkr-hn »

darklajid wrote: post #65
mkr-hn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

net start [service name] net stop [service name]

Actually I tend to use sc start/stop for that, but .. should be the same. Important utilities: - findstr ('grep') - sc (control services) - taskkill (kill/control processes) - netsh (everything network) - wevtutil (windows event log)

I figure there's probably a reason Microsoft uses net for this on their help page.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#93

Post by cwyers »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #63
recursive wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running stuff that requires Windows.

Well obviously - this just seems to be creeping into the space where Linux is an incumbent anyway and I can't see anyone who's running common OSS stacks wanting to use this in favor of Linux based platforms.

If you have servers that need to run Windows, even if they can't run on Nano, you can have fat Windows Server boxes and Nano boxes and configure them using the same tools, rather than having a mixed Windows/Linux shop?

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#94

Post by jdub »

deevus wrote: post #78
motoboi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that is already possible to remote login into a powershell session without any add-on on windows server? Just use Enter-PsSession -computername

PowerShell Server "gives users the power to securely manage Windows remotely through PowerShell from any standard SSH client"

Or you can just run OpenSSH (there are a few nicely packaged versions of it available for Windows) and use PowerShell as the shell. :-)

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#95

Post by amithgeorge »

Someone1234 wrote: post #13

Microsoft has a real hole in their stack in my opinion... So on Linux you have SSH (for shell) and X11 Forwarding/VNC for GUI remoting. On Windows you have RDP for GUI and nothing for remote shell. Now, I know what you're going to say, "WMI" but WMI was never designed for use over the internet. You have to forward two fixed ports and a dynamic range (shudder). Plus it isn't security hardened either by design or throu…

Powershell currently only runs on Windows. One can't use powershell remoting from a Mac OS or *nix machine. Until someone adds non-windows support for Powershell, they need to have a built-in ssh server that opens powershell as the shell. Btw, even if that does happen, it's still difficult to use PS. Any errors that occur in the remote environment get displayed as XML blobs on the client :(

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#96

Post by Intermernet »

mkr-hn wrote: post #92
darklajid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I tend to use sc start/stop for that, but .. should be the same. Important utilities: - findstr ('grep') - sc (control services) - taskkill (kill/control processes) - netsh (everything network) - wevtutil (windows event log)

I figure there's probably a reason Microsoft uses net for this on their help page.

The difference is in synchronicity. Using SC START on the help page should properly be followed by SC QUERY in order to check that the service started. NET START won't return until the service starts, errors, or times out.

> "SC sends the control to the service and then returns to the command prompt. This typically results in SC START returning the service in a state of START_PENDING. NET START will wait for the service it is starting to come to a fully started state before it returns control at the command prompt."

From http://cbfive.com/command-line-service-management-net-v-sc/

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#97

Post by jamra »

emn13 wrote: post #50
darrenkopp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a ssh expert (I live in the MS world), but powershell remote sessions (PSSession) seems like what you are talking about here... it's like running in a powershell window on a remote machine.

I'm not too confident powershell is really good enough to compete with the ancient unix shell. I've tried using it to automate windows machines, but it's certainly not a smooth experience. Part of that is the lack of a history of automation - basic things to do with processes and I/O are kind of schizophrenic. All of the basics are clearly unix inspired (standard streams, processes, redirection - this is all unix-lik…

I recently tried to automate windows machines as well. You are spot on. Dealing with obscure objects requires you to make mock calls and try and reflect on the underlying types. With bash, you don't have types, just text, which allows you to think outside the box.

Powershell reeks of development with C# on Windows. You have specific function calls that can do very niche things such as convert an application to a virtual machine in IIS. The problem comes up when you are trying to do something novel or just out of the scope of what Microsoft thought up. Bash allows for those things by having separate and reusable components that do their one job well.

Get-Object and Set-Object don't work universally as advertised so you can't just write boilerplate and expect things to work. Instead, you have to google "how do I set up a virtual application?" or "how do I change bindings to an existing virtual application?" You'll get the job done, but you won't feel like you learned anything. I'm glad you wrote this up. It's been something that's been bothering me, but I was having difficulty verbalizing it.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#98

Post by cies »

sciurus wrote: post #73
cies wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even my "request for down vote explanation" gets down voted! Hilarious...

"Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ah thanks. Didn't know that.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#99

Post by cthalupa »

munchhausen wrote: post #82
nimish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell is far more usable than sh or even bash as a scripting language. It's more like perl or python were integrated into a nice little command processor, since you can use all the .net libs (though not without some irritating effort). The problem is the cmd host is garbage, the utilities aren't burned into people's brains like the unix ones are, and they have weird Windows specific issues, like not being able t…

A scripting language that can not fork off a subprocess does not sound particularly usable to me. Certainly not more usable than bash, which I find eminently usable. bash gets a bad rap, because there's a ton of horrible shell scripts floating around. For some reason, when people write in bash, they decide that since it's not a "real" programming language, they don't need to take it seriously. They will UPPERCASE all…

> fail to make use of appropriate utilities (which is particularly egregious, considering the fact that the utilities (coreutils, moreutils, etc.) are the API of shell programming).

Some people avoid a lot of the things in the coreutils/moreutils toolbox because they need their shell scripts to be portable between *nix types, and not everything in there is POSIX compliant, even if you set POSIXLY_CORRECT, or even when it is, the syntax is different. I could go through the trouble of having the script check what type of system it's running on and then select the proper flags and syntax, or I could just write something that will work everywhere that might not take advantage of some "feature" found in coreutils.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#100

Post by Elepsis »

MichaelGG wrote: post #83
cies wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then this release (and frankly, any MS product) is not for you. I've certainly re-considered dotNet after it got open sourced recently! It (finally) seemed like a reasonable proposition -- as I explain in my post BTW. But indeed, Windows, and especially Windows-closed-source-on-a-server, is not my cup of tea. And I don't understand how it could be anyone's tea. > But some enterprises use MS software Sure, and this…

Microsoft is super friendly to startups. I can't say details, but they've given us a ton of support. BizSpark Plus ($5K a month free Azure for a year) is great. They've also got marketing help available. While Azure is overpriced compared to Google Cloud (and maybe compared to AWS - dunno cause AWS pricing is convoluted), having them comp it is really nice. Azure is also a lot more full service than Google's stuff, i…

Just curious--I thought all three platforms were committed to essentially matching each other's prices. Has that not been true in your experience? Or is it something specific that's driving up your perceived price of Azure versus the other options?
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