Looking Back At Microsoft's Rocky History In Storage Tech 241
nk497 writes "Following the demise of Windows Home Server's Drive Extender, Jon Honeyball looks back on Microsoft's long, long list of storage disasters, from the dodgy DriveSpace to the Cairo Object File System, and on to the debacle that was WinFS."
Missing ADS (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have to include NTFS alternate data streams as well. It sounded like a good idea, but in practice it just left huge security holes.
Re:Missing ADS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missing ADS (Score:4, Interesting)
ADS was introduced for one reason: to allow NT servers to support Apple clients, without the server needing to do some crazy transforms
Umm, ADS is doing crazy transforms. Some would say giving it a different name and use different OS calls to access different data is worse than using different names and the same OS call to access the different data.
Some people, programmers or otherwise, can't tell the difference between giving something a different name/label and actually doing something different.
This problem is endless in the computer software industry, mainly because of the amorphous nature of software. e.g. redoing OS apps inside a web browser or reinventing file systems inside databases or reinventing hierarchical file systems inside XML and calling it all "new" and "innovative". While there is some invention going on in web browsers, databases and XML, most is just reinventing the wheel. Such software is often necessary for compatibility reasons but recognizing that it is a compatibility layer and putting that compatibility layer at the appropriate interface is the important skill.
Or in other words meta-data is data. Sorry, but until you understand that in your bones you are not a decent programmer.
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Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
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Umm, ADS is doing crazy transforms. Some would say giving it a different name and use different OS calls to access different data is worse than using different names and the same OS call to access the different data.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't applications access alternate streams by doing something so simple as accessing a different filename?
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I'm actually unsure. Isn't it like saying format info is like the text it formats, or maybe even that a program is like the data it accesses ?
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Or in other words meta-data is data. Sorry, but until you understand that in your bones you are not a decent programmer.
Metadata is data, yes, but it is not the data. Users largely don't care if metadata is lost because a file is copied to an incompatible filesystem on a flash drive, synced to Dropbox, emailed to a friend, or maybe even printed out.
Things like ADS provide a way to store data about a file which doesn't have an integrated mechanism to store metadata (e.g., EXIF). Keeping it in a separate name and using an alternative API call makes sense from a compatibility and a simplicity point-of-view. Should old softwar
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Things like ADS provide a way to store data about a file which doesn't have an integrated mechanism to store metadata (e.g., EXIF). Keeping it in a separate name and using an alternative API call makes sense from a compatibility and a simplicity point-of-view.
No it doesn't. It increases the complexity of every program that deals with the file, makes both the files and the accessing programs less portable, hides things from the user they may need to know (mystery program behavior anyone?) and generally jus
Re:Missing ADS (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know of the storage technology in VMware, nor of the value of the cooperative storage ecosystem that SAN and NAS players have invested hundreds of millions into.
This really removes the basis on which you make your further claims.
In short, VMware is successful as the most capable solution of enterprise-scale, exactly because it virtualises not just server hosts, but brings a virtual model to storage - not to mention networking. There is nothing comparable in the MS world, which seeks to leverage existing cluster technology from Server2008 to present a model for VHD storage.
Review VMFS for starters:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmfs/ [vmware.com]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/VMware_VMFS [wikimedia.org]
Microsoft has a sad hack to commit memory in a way that shaves a fraction off of the VMware machine density advantage. They are still competing with a 2006-era VMware - they have no clue how to get out of this, aside from dumping a billion dollars into compete marketing efforts.
The massive executive and senior-engineering exodus from MS is a clear sign that -- even in the halls where sacred Kool-Aid is draughted -- the days of leadership are over, almost before they were enjoyed.
Re:Missing ADS (Score:4, Informative)
And look at this. I have never seen a technology so completely dominate the upper right corner of a Gartner quad in years. MS is admirable to be above the horizon in 3-4 short years, but there is no contest, nor will there really ever get to be one.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf [vmware.com]
Management? MS will still try and convince you of SCCM and the broken DCM.
Security? IPSec isolation everywhere - which your failover times on the IKE renegotiation!
HyperV is a great, cheap QA and Dev lab solution, because it's free with 4 v-instances on Enterprise SKUs. But if you have to tool dev/test different for deployment that you do production? The savings are a false economy.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/Gartner-VMware-Magic-Quadrant.pdf [vmware.com]
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Maybe Gartner is marketing BS. I know they have a LOT more of their bread buttered by MS, than they do by VMW.
You wan to jump from datacenter-oriented storage and network capability to cloud abstraction? That's not really an argument as it is a diversion. :-)
> Microsoft is basing Azure on Hyper-V,
Red herring. Azure is PaaS. The comparison is like saying TiVo is based on Linux. In this case the service-orientation of the IaaS layer (HyperV) services the cloud data center operators, not the end custome
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I would have to include NTFS alternate data streams as well. It sounded like a good idea, but in practice it just left huge security holes.
Ignoring the fact that alternate data streams are incredibly useful, how exactly are they "huge security holes"? That doesn't even make a little sense.
The only argument might be that it makes it easier to hide things from a user, but if that's the case you could just bury a file somewhere in the filesystem, protect the parent directory with ACLs (so it can't be found by searching the filesystem), and be done with it.
ADS is not a security problem. If you have rights to the ADS, you have rights to the main
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Honeyball made a mistake: DriveSpace wasn't the problem in DOS 6.x... DOUBLESPACE was.
The original version of the compression system DOS 6.x had was called DOUBLESPACE & DriveSpace was the corrected version & it was actually QUITE competitive with Stacker (I used both products, Stacker &/or MS DOS with DoubleSpace in v 6.0, & DriveSpace in v. 6.2 - 6.22 of DOS, as well as Stacker from version 6 - iirc, 8, to compare them both...).
APK
P.S.=> Apparently, for all his ranting on the history of Microsoft's storage efforts, Honeyball's "history" isn't 100% accurate (unless he's from an alternate dimension/reality that is, ala "Bizarro World") either... & this is what you get with journalists who are really only that: Writers, instead of being TRUE "Computer Sciences oriented afficianados"...
What I am also additionally "astounded by", is that nobody else here has caught that... but, then again? Most of the folks that seem to hang around /. the past few years now are too young to have even put their hands on the things that "historical critique" type articles use as examples... & my having to cite this needed correction, first here, exemplifies this apparently... apk
Thanks for correcting. I am old enough to remember this :) It was quite a scandal in how it destroyed data and later caught at putting out of business Stacker (despite MS losing the law suit. Like most people, I didn't use this technology long as the compression was a pain in the butt, used lots of resources, and after the initial release data loss issues left me not thinking it was worth the trouble...
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QEMM ! and DesqView ! I remember fondly multitasking DOS stuff and having access to oodles of RAM thanks to DEVICEHIGH and LOADHIGH. I felt so powerful !
I think with Win7, MS has finally managed to become as reliable as DesqView.
What's wrong with NTFS? (Score:2)
I fail to see why the fact that NTFS is still around essentially unchanged is a problem. It serves its purpose well. While MS's internal factionalism has hurt their position in the massive storage arena, the continued stamina of NTFS is a good thing.
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Re:What's wrong with NTFS? (Score:5, Informative)
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Try a more recent version of Ubuntu[from your comment later on/further down].
I run Kubuntu, which is Debian-based Ubuntu with a KDE user interface, instead of Ubuntu default Gnome desktop envoirment/user interface.
The full read and write ability for NTFS has been present in the default install since 8.04, IRC.
I remember downloading NTFS-3g from the repository in 6.06[?] Dapper Drake for read only, but don't remember having to do so with 8.04.
Currently I am running 10.10, and the default install has read-wri
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After all, letting just anyone delete all those files Windows hides from everyone shouldn't be made too easy. But it's handy when someone complains that Windows is unable to delete a file or directory tree, to use a boot linux cd, log in as root, and delete the files.
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It would be absolute madness to release a driver, let alone dedica
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What's wrong with NTFS?
Many, many things. The MFT (Master File Table) which contains all your file system info... may also contain actual files if they are small enough to fit into the remaining space (i.e. disk block sizes matter). Why is this a problem? file wiping software usually won't go near the MFT since you twiddle the wrong bits in the MFT and the entire file system is likely to go poof.
The fact that NTFS doesn't happen to conform to a particular naive model of "how file systems work", namely "all file data is stored in blocks separate from file headers", might be an annoyance to developers of third-party file wiping software, but I wouldn't consider that to be something "wrong" with it. If Microsoft don't supply a file-wiping API that allows user-mode code to request that all the data in a file be wiped, regardless of how that data might happen to be stored for particular files on a part
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Come on.. proper data structure design is stuff that they teach in first year at university in CS courses...
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Come on.. proper data structure design is stuff that they teach in first year at university in CS courses...
Presumably you mean "properly keeping the documentation of the data structures up to date", as there's nothing at all improper about stuffing the data of small files into the same data structure as the file metadata (nor, for that matter, anything unique to Microsoft or NTFS about it).
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What about the lack of relative links?
Relative symbolic links are fully supported in Win7. And I don't think there's even such a thing as a "relative hard link", in any OS or FS, since hard links don't use paths by definition.
Re:What's wrong with NTFS? (Score:5, Interesting)
NTFS still doesn't have shared cluster filesystem capability. This has a bunch of flow-on effects, which basically means that Windows Server clusters are actually "Failover Clusters". The key part of that being the "Fail".
Really basic services like the file shares are impossible to make truly highly available using Windows, because neither NTFS nor SMB support transparent fail-over of open files. There isn't even a way of doing a clean administrative cluster fail-over, such as a drain-stop. The only option is forcibly closing all open files, potentially corrupting user data, and forcing users to click through dirty error messages that their PCs may or may not recover from.
I've tried things like Polyserve, which is a third-party filesystem that has proper cluster support, but it's still hamstrung by SMB. What's doubly ridiculous is that Microsoft basically re-engineered SMB for Vista, and called it "SMB2", but it still can't do clean fail-over!
Similarly, SQL Server can't do proper failover of cluster nodes, nor can it do proper active-active database clusters that share a single database file, because of the limitations of the underlying filesystem. It can no active-active clustering for read-only files, but that's only rarely useful.
Even within Microsoft, workarounds had to be found to make some of their key products somewhat resilient. Both SQL Server and Exchange now use software mirroring for cleaner failover. Ignoring the cost of having to purchase twice as much disk, mirroring has other issues too, like becoming bottle-necked by the network speed, or limiting the features that can be used. For example, if your application performs queries across two databases in a single query, then you can't use Mirroring, because there's no way to specify that the two databases should fail over in a group.
VMware has become a multi-billion dollar company in a few short years because a single non-clustered Windows Server on a VMware cluster is more robust than a cluster of Windows Servers!
"Enterprise Edition" my ass.
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You are correct about many things you point out. I don't see mirroring as a problem if you need an HA environment. Frankly if you are using a shared storage cluster, be it active-active or failover you still have a single point of failure the storage. That is kinda of a deal breaker if you are looking for 5 nines.
VMWare clusters do a good job but are only really HA if you have the right kind of storage to back them up or are remotely replicating them (which is not going to give your clean failover either
Re:What's wrong with NTFS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Would you mind explaining carefully and precisely why you think that OS X's filesystem (and others) aren't prone to fragmentation? It's true that many filesystems incorporate techniques to reduce the likelihood and effect of fragmentation, but it still happens, and it's still possible to optimise the position of data on rotating media - as any good defragmenter will do.
Filesystems which claim not to suffer from defragmentation concern me more because people end up not noticing the decrease in performance over time. For a machine not in 24/7 operation, a scheduled defrag run is always a good idea; otherwise, slowly doing the same during less busy moments should be mandatory.
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You haven't actually answered the question - you could have at least tried to explain how ext3 tries to minimise fragmentation, at which point I'd have given you a list of scenarios where its techniques won't work over time and linked to a few reports about it. Nor does your example of a couple of machines "running for years on their original native FS" tell us anything at all (except maybe that your use is sufficiently light that you've never needed to upgrade). What are the systems doing from day to day?
F
Drive Letters (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, Microsoft worst offense in storage is drive letters, which provide no information about either the type and structure of the underlying disks or the data they contain, and have caused untold headaches from applications (and the OS itself) being reliant on paths that are arbitrarily assigned, subject to change, and often out of the user's control.
Admittedly, Microsoft didn't invent the system, but the fact that drive letters still exist in 2011 is entirely their fault.
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That would be very hard to change, as so many applications would need to be altered.
...but surely it is not beyond the whit of man to emulate drive letters (ln -s /D: /home anybody?) for legacy apps while dragging the rest of the file system into the 1980s?
Instead, the more modern "logical" file system in Windows (as used by the desktop) still feels like an emulation sitting on top of drive letters, and last time I looked required you to use a proprietary GUI.
Still - it could be worse - with all the ex-DEC people involved in Windows NT, they could have gone for the VAX filing system. Ac
s/GUI/API in line 3 (Score:2)
s/GUI/API in line 3
So many TLAs, so few brain cells...
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I'm no application developer, but don't most apps rely on environment variables like %programfiles% and %userprofile% for their paths rather than drive letters?
And reading and writing to files on the network seems to work fine without a drive letter, I can access a shared folder on this computer as \\ComputerName\FolderName from any app, though I prefer to map it to Z: since it's shorter.
So what exactly would be the problem?
I remember some games in the 90s that used "C:\Program Files\..." as their default i
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I would love to introduce you to the internal developers at our place.
"What do you mean I can't write a temporary PDF to c:\ unless I'm administrator? Where *am* I supposed to put it!!!!"
Bloody backslashes... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah. I thought the real problem was choosing slash as the character signifying an option in so many of their utilities.
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It's a bit tedious to keep pointing this out, but actually nothing FORCES stupid people talking to other stupid people to say "forward slash." "Slash" IS "forward slash". "Backslash" is always "backslash." There is no reason for confusion, mental defects such as dyslexia aside.
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Of course the way they went is probably easier for them so from now until forever will home users see every drive as a separate filesystem root - because it
LVM2 or raid? (Score:3)
I have used LVM2 now for two years with my various notebooks and netbooks. They had various crashes and power downs but I never loosed one bit of data. My small home server is using LVM2 as well with my 3 USB hard disks, serves videos and music to my home.
With my notebooks and netbooks I can grow or shrink my root or home partition and with my server [linux-onlineshop.de] I can just plug in another USB hard disk and grow my partition. No fuss not complicated at all and works all the time.
All that for free, just download Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu and install it in 10 minutes. If you want, setup a FTP server, apache server or what ever you like. Or you get what you pay for with Windows for 100$ or more.
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-What happens if you lose a disk?
So you look to install raid
-what if all your disks aren't the same size?
and
-what if you want to upgrade just one disk? Or add a new disk? (I know both are possible with the raid-5 tools, but adding new disks takes HOURS, if not DAYS, depending on the size of your array.... not something I'd call usable to a home user)
MS drive extender and Unraid both have a home-user solution that open source does not match right now. I hope this changes soon!
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MS drive extender and
Well, not anymore do they?
What happens if you lose a disk?
Why, what happens? We are talking about the MS drive extender and with LVM2 you can use such feature with every major Linux distribution since 13 years and that without the risk to loose any data.
If MS only just implemented LVM2 for Windows you would have now a nice space expansion feature which is proven to work.
Raid is not a backup solution [2brightsparks.com] anyway so if you care about your data you need to have a backup strategy.
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Drive extender gracefully degrades, any single drive contains a subset of the complete data and can be read individually.
Drives used with LVM mirror can not, and the array will catastrophically degrade if any two drives carrying a pair of mirrored extents get corrupted.
lack of coordination (Score:5, Insightful)
The article does a fairly thorough job of roasting MS over their lack of internal coordination, outlining how one wing starts to work on a new technology and other departments that need to get on board "wanted nothing to do with it'. In any well-managed company, a department that refuses to get on board with a new technology gets hell rained down on them from above until they fall into line.
Take Apple's "spotlight" meta search feature for example. Imagine the team working on the AddressBook app "wanted nothing to do with it"? There'd be hell to pay, and either team managers would change their tune or get replaced. In a large project like an operating system, lack of cooperation simply cannot be tolerated. But it seems that MS is just so large at this point that it doesn't have the power to guarantee their different projects cooperate fully with each other.
I have read from time to time that there was this sort of internal battle going on at MS, where different projects worked in isolation and there was infighting, but I'd never really seen the effects of these issues before. It's interesting to see the result. This appears to be an upper management or communications problem. Whoever is above the Outlook team needs to be asking that team manager "so how's integration with drive extender going?" If they get foot-dragging and complaining and brush-offs, that manager needs to be dragged into the director's office for some "re-education" on cohesive development. If the director isn't asking these questions, THEY need to be replaced. Something of this sort is isn't working properly at MS.
Its like a construction project. You've got all these separate units coming in, doing electrical, plumbing, structural, heating, floors. The general contractor has to make sure these people work together. Refusing to cooperate with one of the other groups simply cannot be tolerated, and it's the GC's responsibility to make sure everything works smoothly. Problems between groups need to be brought to the GC, and the GC needs to settle them immediately. Otherwise the finished building has serious problems. You can't just turn over the house to the owner and say "Oh by the way we removed the heating from the bathroom. The plumbers wouldn't route the pipes around where the heating ducts needed to go. You don't REALLY need heat in such a small room anyway." But that's the sort of thing that MS is pulling from time to time.
I think MS is just taking the cowardly way out. "We can't control our own internal development processes well enough to get this feature integrated properly in with the rest of our technology, so we're just canceling it." The article states simply that companies like Dropbox and DataRobotics (makers of Drobo) that have only one core technology are forced to "get it right", because dropping it simply isn't an option. MS seems to think they have the option to just drop any feature at any time on a whim if it's not going well, instead of going to the additional effort of kicking some butts and making it work. It's not like its an impossible task. This is doable. They just lack the necessary internal management to pull it off consistently.
Bottom line: At MS, with any new project, unless all the key players decide to get on board, the project is doomed.
In other words, the Outlook team manager should not be capable of tanking Drive Extender. But it is, and it did. And THAT is a serious internal management problem that MS has demonstrated over and over. Something's gotta change.
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With MS's push towards BPOS, private cloud hosting, and applications as a service, why would they put ANY effort into making local storage management easier for the "end user"? There is no profit incentive for them in maintaining extender for WHS.
If the future is 'renting software' in 'the cloud', why would anyone rent Microsoft software?
Microsoft live and die by sales of Windows. If they have to compete on application sales when those applications don't have a lock-in to Windows, they're doomed.
Re:Makes me glad I quit Windows years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Because Windows Server has Active Directory and Group Policies. and Linux doesn't. Thats what sells Windows Server 2000/2003/2008. When there was a proposal to incorporate OpenLDAP auto confguration policy into KDE - it was rejected. That is why Linux lost the war for the Enterprise desktop.
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Group Policies allow for LDAP based control of the Windows System Registry.
Re:Makes me glad I quit Windows years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
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Let me give you an example. Lets say that I had a Linux OpenLDAP Server with Heimdal Kerberos (I do.) and I wanted to make it such that whenever a specific user logged in, he/she/it saw a specific background, and had specific Mail settings, and had specific stuff setup for them, and I wanted this to follow them everywhere. There is no facility in KDE to do that. I cannot tell KDE: "This user has this background wallpaper, their FireFox home page is: www.egroupware.com Their start up sound is iora.wav, etc."
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Re:Makes me glad I quit Windows years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody is saying you can't do that stuff on *NIX but its hard to do that on stand alone machines. When you are talking about shared machines or terminals where everything can be handled with NIS and home directories reside on an NFS share used by all hosts the facilities to manage user experience exist.
As soon as you start having laptops and desktops running all around the office you can't manage the settings the user is talking about anymore. Yes you can do it at deployment time. Sure you could write init scripts to go fetch and overwrite/update rc files and stuff but you'd have to do all of it yourself and it would be a security nightmare to try and get correct without putting a lot of resources into it.
GPOs make it really easy change all the CSRs home pages to the new customer service portal, and set all the sales reps wall paper to the latest product sheet instead of their embarrassing personal photos any time its needed. It also makes it possible to do things like yes your screen saver is going to turn on and the desktop will be locked after 15min, no exceptions. Sometimes that sort of thing gets required for PayCardIndustry rules and the like, and those things change every now and then.
Got a way for me to change your screen saver settings on every Ubuntu box in the company? Yes I know I can run a sed script to go into each home directory and alter the config file for whatever desktop environment is being used, I still have to find away to do it to every box.
Trust me I have been doing this for some years and this is one place where Windows gets it right, so right in fact that it in some ways justifies the use of Windows even though its otherwise a really inferior platform.
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Are you joking? If I want to lock down and sync desktop configurations for all users/workstations or for groups of users/workstations in any *nix it could not possibly be easier, more reliable, transparent, or trouble-free using simple command-line tools . And maintaining that is as easy as invoking the contab editor.
I'm beginning to think the people who say that AD is a kludge for dealing with the registry are prob
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Right its a crontab entry, fine easy. Now change the value on all systems a to something else a year later. Ahh not so easy now is it.
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You still need to roll a LOT of your own scripts - there's nothing built into any desktop environment to say "members of group A get this config file, members of group B get that config file".
There's also no easy way to state "This is the base configuration. In addition to this, apply these rules from group A and those rules for group B."
Sure, you could script all of this yourself - but when discussing Linux on the desktop, the question being asked is not "can you somehow persuade the system to get configu
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If we're talking about replicating something as highly polished as group policy, a script that runs on login to pull in configuration files isn't the hard bit. The hard bit is providing a central, consistent GUI-fied means of tweaking all those configuration files that reduces the configuration to tick-boxes, eliminating the risk of a typo causing havoc when an application tries to read an invalid configuration and if you're lucky reverts to default. If you're unlucky, the application is broken.
Realistica
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News to me.
Quoting Zombie Ryushu in this comment [slashdot.org]:
Lets say that I had a Linux OpenLDAP Server with Heimdal Kerberos (I do.) and I wanted to make it such that whenever a specific user logged in, he/she/it saw a specific background, and had specific Mail settings, and had specific stuff setup for them, and I wanted this to follow them everywhere. There is no facility in KDE to do that. I cannot tell KDE: "This user has this background wallpaper, their FireFox home page is: www.egroupware.com Their start up sound is iora.wav, etc." I can set that up on a per machine basis, but I can't store that information in OpenLDAP so they can use regardless of what their machine is, because KDE doesn't know to retrieve that information.
Doesn't sound like a server task to me.
Quoting DarkOx in this comment [slashdot.org] (which is the very comment you replied to that triggered this discussion in the first place)
As soon as you start having laptops and desktops running all around the office you can't manage the settings the user is talking about anymore. Yes you can do it at deployment time. Sure you could write init scripts to go fetch and overwrite/update rc files and stuff but you'd have to do all of it yourself and it would be a security nightmare to try and get correct without putting a lot of resources into it.
GPOs make it really easy change all the CSRs home pages to the new customer service portal, and set all the sales reps wall paper to the latest product sheet instead of their embarrassing personal photos any time its needed. It also makes it possible to do things like yes your screen saver is going to turn on and the desktop will be locked after 15min, no exceptions. Sometimes that sort of thing gets required for PayCardIndustry rules and the like, and those things change every now and then.
How is that discussing server admin?
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AD is useful, as you note, insofar as it's standardized so you can learn about it on any system. And the distribution method is pretty reasonable; it's not that complicated and MS doesn't do anything terribly stupid to muck it up. It's not a bad system, and given that MS doesn't have a /etc folder that I can easily sync among systems it's a huge improvement over other options.
But being a GUI is not a benefit, at least not in the way you describe. I think it's worth having a GUI -- having a GUI provides a lo
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I take your point regarding the GUI. But without a GUI - or at the very least a standardised way of describing the configuration that is consistent across all your applications - you haven't really got an AD clone. You've just got a few scripts making judicious use of rsync.
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No, The Windows world had that way of thinking with Roaming Mandatory Profiles where "System Policies" were "files" and "scripts" copied from shares. It was utter catastrophe. The Unix 'copy the rc folder method is NT4 level thinking and not Acceptable in today's world. If it is to be acceptable in today's world it must be database driven and granular. This is why MySQL is so popular, and this is why Linux's directory services have gained no market or mind share.
The best thing anyone could do is force KDE
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Yes, well it works very well in the *nix world -- the NT failures you cite do not affect us at all.
Huh? No-one can seriously brag about the *registry*, it's the Achilles' Heel of windows! This can only mean you've never seriously used any o
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I'm a staunch Linux User. I hate Windows. But I also know LDAP is a good idea.
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Maybe, but if so you've still got a lot to learn. Like how to admin without KDE or gnome, for instance. :)
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The logic is fine, the terminology is poor.
Group Policy provides a mechanism and comprehensive set of capabilities for central configuration management of Windows machines. "Control of the Registry" is merely an irrelevant implementation semantic.
Central configuration management is - amazingly, given its age - functionality significantly lacking from Linux/UNIX. IME this is l
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So IOW it sells to people who don't understand how to manage users and groups?
Group Policy is a very powerful tool for applying policy rules across an entire organization. It has very little to do with managing users and groups, other than that the criteria for who or what the policies apply to is often based on membership in a group.
I've worked with Unix and Linux on and off over the years, and I am not aware of an equivalent in the Linux world, at least not a standard package that works on multiple major
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Oh I don't know about that. Cron and rsync are pretty well proven to be quite reliable and flexible. Of course it does require some competence, no pointy-clicky...
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Honestly.... this argument is stupid, Group Policy arose because on Windows everything is a COM object with an ACL and it was neigh impossible to manage to provide even a modicum of security without some sort of system policy at a high level. Linux of course doesn't need this because it operates in a fundamentally different manner where everything is a file and the file system permissions (group based) determine if a is executable or not. Thus the Linux kernel doesn't need to know what specific COM+ handler
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Group Policy is useful in that it's standard. There's a lot of value in that, particularly in finding new people already familiar with it. And it addresses one of the key management problems with Windows -- the registry -- which is good because before AD it was nigh on impossible to deal with that mess.
But you can't honestly believe both that it's "more standard" and "more flexible" at the same time. Those goals are mutually exclusive. It might be flexible enough for your purposes, or even for most anyone's
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drive extender's "features" that Microsoft couldn't get to work right include stuff that has been standard in the Unix world for over a decade
"Drive extender" in WHS is, essentially, RAID that can be hot-extended - you plug a new hard drive into your server, and your storage (which shows up as a single disk) grows immediately. I don't know about the Unix world, but I certainly haven't seen any Linux distro that was configured that way. Can you name some names?
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It's on the fly data duplication with a union filesystem ... which has completely different failure modes than RAID (also much lower throughput but for a media server striping isn't necessary). Greyhole is the only comparable system on *nix, and it's very rough still.
Re:Makes me glad I quit Windows years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Please name a linux based solution, apart from 100% proprietary Unraid, which allow for me to do what drive extender does. I'm serious. I refuse to install WHS, and thus far the closest I can find is going Unraid, which feels dirty to me, or nexentastor.
What drive extender does, in a nutshell:
-all of your hard drives show up as one big storage pool.
-100% of disparate drive sizes can be used (excluding copies/parity obviously). So if you have 3 old 1tb drives, 2 old 1.5tb drives, and 1 2tb drive you'll have 8gb of storage
-configurable redundancy such that any single disk failure, no matter the size, all files are still available
-if two drives fail, you only lose the files that were on those two drives, not the entire array
-take any one drive out of the array, plug it into ANY windows vista or higher PC (new NTFS version), have access to all the files that were stored in that drive.
-add a drive, get that much more storage (excluding copies/parity obviously)
ZFS comes DAMNED close, but you cannot grow the number of disks in a raidz array, you have to add an entire extra array (meaning 3+ disks) to the pool. You also lose the entire array if 2 (or 3 with raidz2, or 4 with raidz3) disks die, and cannot have direct file access just by plugging in 1 disk of the array, but that honestly doesn't bother me that much.
Oh, and ZFS isn't on linux except through fuse.
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I especially like your #1:
-all of your hard drives show up as one big storage pool.
Not only does EVERY unix do that, it's the ONLY way it can be done. Mixing up the logical and physical partitions in such a convoluted way is a Microsoft only type of deal. Drive letters were thrown out in real operating systems decades ago. Again, Windows: Failing today to do what Unix successfully did decades ago.
Re:Makes me glad I quit Windows years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet, so LVM provides redundancy? Or I still need to use software raid for that, which reqires all disks to be the same size in order to get full usage out of them?
And if I create an LVM array, and 1 disk dies, I no longer lose everything, the filesystem is easily mounutable and I only lose the files that were on that disk and weren't redundant (which you've also assured me LVM handles for you?)
And who mentioned drive letters? You're telling me that every unix will combine all of my storage devices into one pool, as opposed to having to mount them discretely in mount points? So if I have 5 disks, by default all of my files, regardless of location in the filesystem, will get nicely distributed across said disks? That's great to know as well! Last time I checked (about 2 seconds ago, from the ubuntu box I'm posting this from) you have to choose a mount point for any volume (logical or physical), and it only provides storage to that section of the filesystem. If my /var/log is full, and I just throw in another 1tb disk, /var/log does not get access to that new storage.
I asked a serious question. I really am interested in a set of technologies that have the same capabilities as unraid (which is linux based but NOT open nor free) and drive extender. LVM and software raid are in no way comparable.
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I've heard of LVM, and used it in all of my linux servers. It's a life saver when it comes to dynamically resizing storage pools. But it's in no way comparable to drive extender. Read the post you replied to and tell me which of the points LVM ticks off. I know which ones, but i'll leave it to you to decide.
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A LVM span only has a single underlying filesystem, if you lose a drive you're fucked.
You'd need a union filesystem to be able to take out any number of drives and still be left with a functioning array (minus some files). None of the union filesystem supports automatic duplication though.
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And how many technologies fail on FOSS systems. I just got a patch last year that allowed my wifi to connect in under 5 minutes. While Mac and Windows did it very fast for year. (2002 from my experience). Sure we like to see Microsoft fail because it is a huge company and has a strong foothold in our technology, and during the 90's it seemed to the media it could do no wrong. But looking at it's failures and saying Microsoft is all bad while I zealiously promote an other product ignoring it deficiencies.
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There's a reason Google has banned the use of the toy OS for development machines, they don't want their information being stolen by hackers. There are also other, easier ways to do what group policy does. I never found it to be even remotely useful, or even remotely make up for al
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What good is any sort of enterprise policy on an OS thats trivial to hack?
It isn't if the sysadmin and netadmin know what the hell they're doing.
Not to mention that all that group policy bullshit is proprietary, they don't even use open authentication methods, NTLM is just WAITING to be hacked.
Because MS has never implemented Kerberos, right? And most companies don't give a shit if MS has proprietary bullshit if it has all the features they need, like the aforementioned group policy, Exchange, Active Directory, etc.
There's a reason Google has banned the use of the toy OS for development machines, they don't want their information being stolen by hackers.
Because external threats are the only kind that exist! Oh, wait, there's also employee ineptitude, like plugging in a petri dish of a flash drive and opening up more gaping backdoors than you'll find at a massive ga
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, I find it hilarious that you use this example as an example SUPPORTING Microsoft. You are aware that it was ONLY FUCKING MICROSOFST that had autolaunch and until
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Actually Microsoft only released it as an update to XP recently, to change the default setting. You have always been able to turn off autorun by modifying the registry directly and there have been group policy templates to do it almost as long.
If anyone wanted auto run off in an enterprise setting it was trivial to do, you just through the switch in GP or put a couple lines in the logon script if you were not using GPOs for some reasons like you were in a non domain environment or whatever.
The only persons
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What good is any sort of enterprise policy on an OS thats trivial to hack?
Because not everyone in your organisation is a hacker? Group policies are applied for the most part to bring idiots in line with company security policy. This is similar to blocking traffic to certain ports on the firewall. It stops a few people from firing up MSN at work, but does nothing to the guy with a Linux box somewhere off in the internet providing SSH tunnel for endless amusement. That said these single "hackers" of corporate policy are easy enough to keep an eye on.
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If you want good and extensive developer documentation (and other support), I highly recommend using Qt for your Unix development wherever possible. It's not just an UI toolkit, it's a full-fledged framework that covers a lot of ground - probably about as much as .NET 1.x.