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Microsoft Announces Nano Server

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Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#111

Post by gbog »

fla wrote: post #28

They call it Nano, I call it a server. Happy to see Microsoft is evolving. Let's hope it will be for everyone's best.

> Let's hope it will be for everyone's best.

Anything making MS better cannot be for everyone's best: they have a de facto monopoly, and of the most dangerous kind.

That's why despite all the bad that can be said against Google and Android, at the very least they had enough weigth (and talent, and luck) to push MS out of mobile. Which was the greatest news for our industry since Internet.

Also, I do not agree with Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html): sadly, MS is not dead yet. It cannot be dead for real with 9x% of install on PCs.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#112

Post by basch »

freehunter wrote: post #27
simonjgreen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSH access to PowerShell would be a game changer IMHO for Microsoft. Also, have you seen this? http://www.powershellserver.com/download/

I don't know if it exists the other way around or not, but it would be really nice if Windows had a built in SSH client as well. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a client's Windows Server machine and needed to remote into a Linux server, but neither I nor they had access to download Putty.

http://www.mls-software.com/opensshd.html

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#113

Post by motoboi »

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"

I got your point. Manage windows boxes from non-windows stations.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#114

Post by tracker1 »

dragontamer wrote: post #108
tracker1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on most of your points... PowerShell is by far the most powerful shell I've ever worked with on any platform... that said, I don't like it. It's very verbose. As a JS guy, these days most of my scripts run via node/iojs and are as platform agnostic as possible. More and more I know it only needs to run in linux, or is guiding dockerization. Even then, bash scripts tend to be easier to reason about.

You could always write JScript. Ha ha ha! http://blog.idleworx.com/2010/01/windows-scripting-host-and-... I've seen a few open-source projects actually use this. (IIRC, it was WiX)

Actually, I did do a bit of JScript WSH scripts back in the day, well before PowerShell was an option even. IT works relatively well... I even shoved some initial logic into a few of my node scripts for windows that would, if run from WSH relaunch themselves in node.

The biggest issue with JScript in general is probably the lack of open options for certain classes of COM controls, that and COM collections are a beast (the enumeration wrapper you need in JScript is horrible). JScript was my preference just the same back with Classic ASP scripts. Could re-use my logic client and server-side, which usually worked out pretty well... though almost everybody used VBScript, which usually meant in a project both engines were loaded on the server. The other issue was runtime initialization for every request meant you were somewhat limited, though for a couple hundred users on a system at once around 1999-2002, it wasn't bad.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#115

Post by emn13 »

jamra wrote: post #97
emn13 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 virt…

I bet that C# would actually make a better scripting language than powershell - you can actually use most of .net easily (especially generics), and async support is a real boon in scripting. It's mostly missing a decent library to do practical process-glue stuff - the .NET `Process` is verbose, incomplete, and a minefield.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#116

Post by GrinningFool »

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…

> bash gets a bad rap, because there's a ton of horrible shell scripts floating around

I remember when this was the most common defense of VB :D

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#117

Post by MichaelGG »

chebum wrote: post #104
MichaelGG wrote: post #81

My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic…

IIS management is done via WMI which will work for this version of Windows Server: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj635848.aspx

Right, it technically exists, and for some common scenarios, some people may get it to work. Step outside that, and it seems like a world of pain. Like, for instance, IIS's half-baked reverse proxy, ARR (Application Request Routing). Despite being aimed at a very narrow set of applications and overall being cumbersome and annoying, all of the docs I've found on it are screenshot-and-clickhere based.

MS has a ton of work to do if they wanna make a non-GUI Windows viable, and it seems like if they don't have a lot of that work done upfront, they're going to end up providing a very unappealing first taste to customers. I hope they succeed, just that it seems to be a much larger problem than just cutting out parts of Windows.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#118

Post by jyrkesh »

girvo wrote: post #80
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…

Where's the best place to get details on the internals of the Windows kernel regarding things like that?

I've heard really good things about the "Inside..." series: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Microsoft-Programming-S...
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