Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 11:42:17 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Tiny starter configuration for FreeBSD Message-ID: <00e101c1612f$8dcf8830$0a00000a@contactdish> References: <00cd01c160ea$3e6b07a0$6600000a@columbia>
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Andrew writes: > Code stolen when Microsoft swallowed up a group > of system programmers from Digital. No code was stolen. Microsoft hired experienced OS programmers, many of whom came from Digital, which no longer seemed to be interested in their services to the extend it had once been. They applied their skills and experience to writing a new operating system, and naturally the principles they had developed in the past were applied to make the new OS just as stable and reliable and performant. But no code was stolen. There was no need, and in any case, since the new OS had a different design, any old code would have had to be rewritten, anyway. > Umm, really? Yes, really. > I've always thought of 95 as an upgrade > from 3.1 in that it had 32 bit extensions, a > better memory manager, and no need to type > win at the prompt. There's a mountain of code behind those three differences. > Otherwise, it's still a shell over a > version of DOS. To a certain extent, yes, but it had to be compatible with the old stuff. For people who wanted security, performance, and stability instead of support for old games, there was Windows NT. > That code has to be there for legacy support. Easy > way to commit corporate suicide is to scrap your > legacy code completely and write something > absolutely new. Windows NT didn't seem to be suicidal. IBM probably would have agreed with you, since they split up with MS precisely because the latter wanted to write something from the ground up, but IBM turned out to be wrong, and MS turned out to be right. IBM's effort ended up as OS/2, and we all know where OS/2 is today (nowhere, essentially). > At least they finally got it right, for the > most part. They already had it right with Windows NT, but some people wanted more--and more importantly, MS needed another cycle of "upgrades" to maintain its revenue stream. > Same old marketing hype. 2000 was supposed to be > the merger of the Win9x and NT lines... didn't happen. > XP was supposed to do that as well, and from > what I can gather, it didn't happen. I haven't seen the code for 2000 and XP, so I can't comment, although I believe 2000 was essentially a rehash of the NT architecture, at least at the kernel end. > Eh, only if you don't sneeze in their direction... Sneezing or not, Windows NT is an extremely solid OS. As I've said, I've seen NT systems run for years without a boot. > As long as you don't have a network cable plugged > into it, or a floppy drive, or a CD-Rom. That's the > ONLY way that Microsoft EVER got NT certified as > C3 by the DoD. That's the only way _any_ OS could usually be certified under the Orange Book. It is very, very difficult to secure a system with network connections, particularly one that supports an environment as heterogenous as that supported by NT. > ... this severely limits the usefulness of NT > if you want a secure environment. If security is an issue, you're better off with a locked-down machine running NT than with almost any version of UNIX. There are whole categories of security features that are missing in UNIX and standard in NT, with ACLs being at the top of the list. > If you're running a package built to their standards, > their specs, and with your checkbook. True of any OS. > Most "stable" NT platforms were designed at the factory and > shipped that way. Not true. I've built stable NT systems on generic hardware, as long as it is good-quality hardware and all of it is on the NT HCL. > Hmm... having experience with 95, 98, NT and 2000... > while NT and 2000 are more stable, the biggest problem > with the 9x line has been the memory manager problems > in addition to memory leaks. Maybe my experience has been > atypical. I don't use any of the 9x operating systems, so I cannot comment. I consider them all to be "toy" operating systems, like their predecessors MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows NT is an industrial-strength operating system, in the same category as UNIX. (This is still a bit short of mainframe operating systems, but it's a vast improvement for the desktop and for servers.) > I'm happy for you. For the work it takes to make > NT stable, you could have FreeBSD at near flawlessness. No work was required to make NT stable. I simply avoided doing anything to make it _unstable_. I am certain that FreeBSD is exactly the same, as most operating systems are that way. > Then you haven't been bitten by one of the famous > NT bugs. Nope, I have not. Most users haven't. > There's a limiting factor somewhere in the code as > far as uptime, if I remember correctly. Something > like 38-39 days. Nope. NT systems can and do run for years at a time. Often they are booted only to change the configuration (something that UNIX apparently cannot escape, either). > If you research it far enough, you can turn off > most, if not all, of that junk that you don't need. > Problem is, when you start monkeying with the > configuration, if you move widget A, you end > up screwing up sprocket C half-way across the > machine's continuum. Exactly. And I don't have time to spend on things like that. > Unless you run Solaris in it's stock incarnation... > along with a few other commercial Unices which > have a GUI built in. One more reason to not run Solaris. If I want bells, whistles, and bloat, I'll just install Windows 2000. > So, soft-updates and sshd running by default constitutes > minimal security and integrity features? Yes. > It's a lot better than some other versions of Unix > that I've seen. That's not saying much. Ever used Multics? > Hype. Pure marketing hype. IBM supports Linux, > and IBM is never wrong (don't get me started on this) > so everyone is going to Linux. Most Linux fans have probably never heard of IBM, I think. They are just jumping on the bandwagon. The bandwagon says buy Linux, so they buy Linux. The bandwagon says bash Microsoft, so they bash Microsoft. And so on. I'm even more set against Linux now that I've learned that it is just a kernel, and not a complete OS. I want a complete UNIX system, not just the skeleton. Hopefully FreeBSD (getting back to the topic of this list) will prove to be just that. 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