Undrblog - Windows

Windows Hatred.

nospam@example.com (War) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:07:24 -0500

Call me a bitter unix user if you must, but after today, I need to vent some of my Windows related frustration.

Today, we found that the scheduled tasks we have setup on one of our, rather important, servers, just decided to stop working. When they run, as scheudled, as a user, they return a result code of "0x80", and do nothing. If you run them as a logged in user, they work perfectly. What's up with that?! Turns out that this is a bug! Yes, microsoft managed to screw up the TASK SCHEDULER, of all things. The problem is, that this bug was supposedly fixed in SP2 for Windows 2003. Guess what? The server in question already has SP2 on it! You know what they say to do to fix this now? Delete all of the tasks, reinstall SP2, reboot, re-add your tasks.

What? You want me to uninstall a core OS update, on a production machine?! Why in the hell would iw ant to do that?! All to fix the task scheduler? Mind you, this scheduler worked perfectly until just a few days ago. No updates were installed, no permissions changed, nothing, the issue arose on its own, as far as we can tell.

This is so frustrating. You have no idea. It's no secret that i'm a Unix/Linux fan. This very site runs on Linux. When was the last time i had a cron job spontaneously stop running? Let me think..... NEVER! unless there was a problem with the target of the job, which isnt cron's fault! In this case, the program which is to run works perfectly, its the scheduler itself that's busted.

How can microsoft get away with charging so much money, for such crap? Yea, i know Unix isnt bug free. There are plenty of very nasty bugs and exploits which will ruin any unix admin's day, but at least theyre not with core OS utilities, like the task scheduler!

I cant remember the last time i rebooted my server. I bet if i were to go check uptime right now, it'd be 100+ days.

[war@www ~]$ uptime

18:02:26 up 264 days, 22:51, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.03

There you have it, 264 days. That's what, 9 months? Sure, i've seen windows servers up that long too, but not if you plan to actually keep the system up to date. You;ll be rebooting once a week if you run updates as often as you probably should. 90% of the updates i run on my server wont reboot the server. And if a reboot is requred, i'm not forced into it like on windows. Most things can be reloaded without a reboot. Why cant Microsoft grasp that idea?

I think i;m going to try to convince my boss to move his sql database and his parsing scripts to MySQL and linux. I'll let you know how that goes over.

Protect me from myself, please!

nospam@example.com (War) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 07:35:16 -0500

I work in an IT firm. Well, i guess thats what you'd call us. We do web hosting, development, a little internet access. We do more than just hosting, so i dont really think calling us a host is broad enough. I do Admin work, i administer a mix of Windows, and *nix servers. Theres two of us, and between the both of us, we do a pretty good job of keeping things stable. The servers stay up, we keep them up to date, we're constantly working to improve on the things that were put in place by earlier admins (who more often than not, did things wrong!).

All along though, it seems that our biggest hassle is the mechanism's put in place to help "protect" everyone from viruses. Not believe me, i know how important it is to prevent the spread of viruses. Try managing 100+ Windows servers sometime, you'll know what i mean.. I really think it's gotten out of hand though. In the position we're in, it's common that we need clients to send us things. Content for their wesite, half finished site designs or web applications, databases, programs to inspect, install, or whatever. What's the easiest way to send files to one another across the internet? You got it... E-mail! We use an exchange serer, so of course, we use Outlook, in order to take advantage of all of the "Features" that microsoft has so graciously packed into its overbloated answer to an e-mail server. Outlook strips attachments on its owrn. Yesterday i was working on a task from our shared task list. I wrote a perl script that needed to be deployed on a number of servers, and along with its deployment, a command line compression utility had to be installed. So i attached them both to the task for "safe" keeping.Well when i saved the task, Outlook tells me that i've attached "Possibly unsafe files" and that they might not be available to me if i re-open the task. I assume it's talking about the installer for the command line utility, and figure, what the heck, and just tell it ok. It's not that important that the file is attached to the task anyway.

Well i come back to my task later, open it up, and as i expected, the .exe is no longer attached. No big deal. The perl script is still there. Ok, back to work. Once I've made some updates, and want to save my task, it tells me that the same damn file is "unsafe"... It's not there! I can only assume that instead of removing it, outlook has hidden it. Which is just great. Now my task takes up an additional 3MB of storage on the exchange server, because of a file, that i cant even access. BRILLIANT! On top of that, i tried to replace my perl script with a newer version of it, and guess what.... It crashed Outlook.

Anyway, the point of the story is this. At what point does security become more of a burden than a tool? We have to keep things so locked down anymore in the IT field, that we need to find a way around our own security whenever we want to get some work done...

-War

Windows Server...

nospam@example.com (War) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:10:22 -0400

How has Windows Server gained such a foothold in the IT field?

I work at a Webhost, we probably have 75% of our clients hosted (at the client's request!) on Windows servers. Part of this is becuase a lot of our customers are ColdFusion users, which we only run on Windows. The other day, we had a problem with a new customer which we setup on one of our Windows 2000 servers, with Front Page 2002 extensions. They were unable to login. Front Page gave a nice vague error of something like "You are not authorized to preform the current operation".

I spent two bloody hours troubleshooting this! It sounds simple right? Permissions? I'd say so, but you'd be wrong. Well, actually, I can't say you'd be wrong, because I don't know for sure what fixed it! I spent most of that 2 hours repeating the exact same steps in different orders. Which eventually fixed the problem. I found documentation from Microsoft that says that the site must be configured to accept Digest authentication for FP to work, but then i found another doc that said that Digest authentication will break FP's extensions, and you need Basic authentication. Now, Basic authentication is CLEAR TEXT! No encryption, just plain old text. Let's hear it for security. Basic authentication ended up working, along with resetting some permissions, reinstalling the FP Server Extensions (at least twice) and running the "Check server extensions" deal at least twice.

What a load of crap this OS is! 2003 is only slightly better, it'd added a few new features that make it much more bearable, but still just as cumbersome at the same time.

And what about error logging? Windows does a terriffic job of logging just enough data to tell you there was a problem, and not enough to give you even a hint at where to start digging. Why?! My CentOS server not only usually gives you a descriptive error message, but also tells you (gasp!) what file you might be able to find that error in! What a concept!

I guess Micro$oft has a better marketing department, and that's what really matters anymore, not stability, or dependability, or even optimum use of resources. No, pretty gui's, and apparent ease of use is what draws in todays customers. I've been running this server on a 670Mhz Intel PIII for years! It's up all the time, runs a database server, web, mail, and a host of other little gadgets that i tinker with. It serves as a development platform for my projects, hosts my personal mail server, and every site i've ever thrown at it, and aside from my initial investment in hardware, it's ALL FREE!

Yea, it takes some knowhow to make it all work, but isn't that what IT admin's get paid for? I thought so....

-War