Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:16:35 +0800 (HKT)
Gelsema, P \(Patrick\) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I do agree that microsoft has the benefit of everything together where you
will have to install port and port and package to end up with the same
result.
the problem is that you get 'everything together' for all values of
'everything' that the MS teams in Redmond came up with. If you need something
slightly different, you either change your requirements, add other software
(MS upgrade , MS-other-product or added value tool from 3rd party) for $$ or
have to contract to a MS solution provider for a fix.
I've been working with OSS for over 13 years and I still haven't come across
something that I couldn't put together with OSS...maybe I am not original
enough..who knows.
Windows AD , policies,etc are being handled, AFAIK, by current versions of
Samba.I think they are even looking into implementing WMI.
And dont forget WINE as well :)
Nevertheless, you should use whichever tool best solves your problem. It may be
MS, no worries. It may be open source, great. It may be FreeBSD, even better :)
B
_
{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
I speak for myself, not my employer. Contents may be hot. Slippery when wet.
Reading disclaimers makes you go blind. Writing them is worse. You have been
Warned.
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
Norberto Meijome writes: And dont forget WINE as well :) Respectfully, the list of things WINE will not - by its own documentation - run and has no expectation of running in the foreseeable future is immense. Seasonal example for Americans: TurboTax. Robert Huff ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:33:30 -0400
Robert Huff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Respectfully, the list of things WINE will not - by its own
documentation - run and has no expectation of running in the
foreseeable future is immense. Seasonal example for Americans:
TurboTax.
sure. and neither does our Australian Tax office software. which I run on a
win32 box or a win32 VM under qemu.
but wine has come a huge way from when I started to track it, back in '98 or so.
anyway, choice is the key word here , i think :)
cheers,
B
_
{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome
A tree as big around as you can reach starts with a small seed; a
thousand-mile journey starts with one step.
Lao-tse
I speak for myself, not my employer. Contents may be hot. Slippery when wet.
Reading disclaimers makes you go blind. Writing them is worse. You have been
Warned.
___
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Nejc Škoberne Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 1:51 AM To: User Questions Subject: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...) Sorry, but OpenOffice is more featureless than MS Office 2007. There are things which you can do with MS Office so MUCH easily than with OpenOffice. For feature comparison see: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480 Not to mention performance issues with OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/ms2007vsooo2.pdf The interface in Office 2007 is completely different than Office 2003 and most people in business that I know are not running Office 2007 and have no plans to upgrade. Even when they buy brand new systems. Office 2003 runs great on Vista so why change? Since the interface is different, any business that does change is going to suffer a huge cut in productivity for a long time while their accountants and secretaries and such all retrain. The reports of Office 2007 sales are grossly inflated because most businesses are on a yearly Microsoft site license that they pay a lot to maintain, and that license gives them free upgrades to the new software - so after MS released Office 2007 every time a business anniversary renewal came up MS counted those as sales, even though for most companies don't load the new Office. The reason a lot of companies are looking at OpenOffice right now is they are looking into dropping MS Office completely from their site licenses due to the cost savings. Since OpenOffice is compatible with all their Office 2003 Word and Excel documents it's a good time to look at switching. want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. Not true. All you need do is install spamassassin, and have it tag mail and forward it to the user. Then setup procmail as the LDA and sort the tagged mail into a SPAM folder in the users home directory. From IMP or OpenWebmail you have access to local mail folders on the server and you just instruct your users that the SPAM folder is their quarentine. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). Microsoft does no more integration than most others. For an example of a really integrated product look at Lotus Notes. But, most users dislike it because it puts a huge amount of control over their work into the hands of the company. You don't walk into a Notes shop and see the adminstrative assistants working on e-mails to their boyfriends, the way that you do in a MS Office shop. Probably you use it more than I do, I really run FreeBSD servers mostly. And I have problems with providing nice-packaged, easy-to-use, all-in-one software to users who are used to that. I use FreeBSD/OS mostly because it is free of charge and because it is quite costumisable. If MS products would be free of charge, I would probably switch to them in most cases. Never gonna happen. There's a fundamental difference here between free open source and commercial software. Commercial software mostly caters to what subgroups of users within the market want. Take MS Word for example. Most people never use more than a 10th of it's features. But, most people don't all use the same 10th. In order to keep selling Word, MS has to put all these small fringe demands of the subgroups into Word. Open source mostly caters to what the majority of users agree is needed. That is why you won't ever find an open source package that is all things to all people. If your a user who has all your needs met it's a great thing. But if your a user who has one specific need that the open source packages don't have, then even though all of the rest of your needs could be met by open source, you likely will not switch over. I just don't agree with the statement, that Windows servers are completely inferior to FreeBSD and you could replace all of them with FreeBSD boxen. If that would be possible, I would do it already. I really am a FreeBSD guy, I run it for more than 6 years now and I like it a lot. But I learned to be reasonable and not to say that it is in every way superior to everything else in the world. Nothing out there is in every way superior to everything else in the world. Even Microsoft software, you said it yourself, simply has nothing to offer to people who don't have much more money than what it costs to purchase the computer hardware itself. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:40:53AM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:32:08PM -0800, Donald Laniohan wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Good for your brother. First thing to do is get on the FreeBSD website: http://www.freebsd.org/ and start reading.Especially read the handbook and things about installing and setting up FreeBSD. Then put some stuff on it, such as browser (Firefox, probably), web server (Apache), office tools (OpenOffice) and maybe a few games from /usr/ports and learn to use those. You might want to add database (MySQL), interpreter (Perl, PHP) and other stuff as needed. Considering the purpose here is to build a server, I doubt Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and games would really be appropriate at this time. Have fun. I second the motion. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Marvin Minsky: It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 06:29:09PM +0100, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote: Hello, 2008/3/20, Nerius Landys [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You could make it a video game server. That's why I set up a FreeBSD server. I run games/iourbanterror, but there are other games you could run. And could FreeBSD be used to become a streaming internet radio station? Has anyone been doing something like that? I am very interested to hear and hopefully it is still within the topic here... Technically speaking: Easily. Legally speaking: That depends on who's going to be listening to it. Of course, the same is true of any other OS that could server as a streaming internet radio station. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Isaac Asimov: Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 01:01:35AM +0800, Gelsema, P (Patrick) wrote: On Fri, March 21, 2008 00:39, Chad Perrin wrote: On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:50:34AM +0100, Nejc Å koberne wrote: So you are saying that merely setting up an OpenLDAP server with proper DNS configuration and Kerberos authentication could replace Microsoft AD controller? How about a group of controllers with all the failover features? Group policies? Are you sure you could do that just with a bit of tweaking? If there are Microsoft specific features, than FreeBSD can't do anything Windows server does and more. I am really skeptic about joining a Vista into such a domain. I would really love to see ONE guy who achieves that. To _completely_ replace Windows server with all its features with FreeBSD Anyone? Full AD parity is expected with the release of Samba 4: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035-6053709.html WINS capability is already available in ports with the samba4wins port, by the way. WINS is required mostly for Browsing networks, Master browser selection and Netbios connections (the infamous 13x ports). However Microsoft is really trying to get rid of Netbios connections and only have made it available for backwards compatibility. If I aint mistaken port used for file connections is somewhere in the 400 range. It is definitely not required for a full Windows Domain and for file-sharing. True. I'm just not sure how that's particularly relevant to what I said. In addition to that, as I pointed out in another email, FreeBSD can *easily* provide all the same functionality -- though MS Windows clients may not support all the necessary protocols and client applications needed to take full advantage of that functionality in some cases. In fact, FreeBSD supports software that does a far better job of being a server or client in an MS Windows network than MS Windows does of being a server or client in a BSD Unix network. snap/snap I'm sorry . . . does that mean anything? You've lost me. The most important thing: we are talking about ordinary users not a bunch of math professors who want to run every application from a shell. And those users want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. The problem of mail is then cut to so many little pieces that it may affect user efficiency. The problem with concatenating so many opensource products is that it is hard to make them work together like a charm. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). You don't have to run everything from a shell with FreeBSD. What do you think this is -- 1994? Even manpages can be accessed with a GUI application. Microsoft does *not* provide everything people need. When someone uses a piece of software that isn't produced by Microsoft, chances are good that any MS software will have been designed specifically to make it difficult to interoperate. Meanwhile, a lot of open source software interoperates very well. Sure, if you limit yourself to nothing but MS software, you might get really good integration -- but that's at the cost of reduced security (thanks to lack of privilege separation and the ubiquitous use of IE's rendering engine for pretty much every single application Microsoft produces) and refusing to use a lot of software that Microsoft doesn't offer. I find it really hard to change, finetune settings on windows. Changing default ports eg. The standard tools provided are limited and there is no default. THink about netsh and net commands. Funny . . . I don't seem to have these problems. Have you asked for help here? Also security wise. You need to give more permissions to an account to do something than you should on Freebsd. Chrooted applications for instance. Say what? . . . as opposed to MS Windows, where about 50% of what someone needs to do on a given day requires escalation to administrative permissions? I really am a FreeBSD guy, I run it for more than 6 years now and I like it a lot. But I learned to be reasonable and not to say that it is in every way superior to everything else in the world. When did anyone say that FreeBSD was in every way superior to everything else in the world? You must be reading a different discussion than the one I've been reading. My point exactly. . . . You lost me again. Still just talking, not fighting. I'm just offering a perspective and asking
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 08:57:01AM -0700, mdh wrote: It's been my experience that finding drivers for hardware created for open source operating systems by developers within the communities is quite easy, while such community doesn't exist for windows and you are 100% reliant on the vendor to supply working drivers. If they supply crap drivers, go out of business and stop providing any, etc, you are simply out of luck, while with an open source model it is likely that someone will have kept development going if the vendor ever even did produce drivers for those systems. There's very little in the way of modern hardware that isn't supported by FreeBSD. The one time I ever ran into unsupported hardware, a quick update of -STABLE brought the necessary support in the driver. The fact is that political BS aside, for 90% of workers, FreeBSD/KDE/openoffice/firefox will meet their needs just as well as windows, and in fact if you start with something like PC-BSD I think 90% is pessimistic, actually. It's probably closer to 98%. By the way, please don't top-post. The freebsd-questions list is one of those where I get to enjoy a no top-posting rule, and seeing unnecessary top-posting kinda harshes my mellow here. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Paul Graham: Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, March 20, 2008 15:32, Donald Laniohan wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it make it a webserver (apache) Make it a proxy (squid) make it an email server (www.tnpi.biz/mailtoaster) make it a DNS server (Bind) make it a database server (mysql/postgresql) make it a firewall (a proper one, not like windows) make it a vpn server (can windows do this out of the box?) make it a sniffer (definitely something that windows cant do out of the box) and so forth.. everything you run on windows can be run on Freebsd and more. It is hard to install something not knowing what you want. I mean installing windows 2003 out of the box wont do you any good as well, untill you configured the services which you want. So.. a nice task could be.. replacing the windows 2003/2000/2008 server with a Freebsd box and not loosing functionality for the end user. So pick a win box, write down what it is doing for you. THen find the FreebSd ports for it and try to have it working. Good luck Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
everything you run on windows can be run on Freebsd and more. Huh? AFAIK FreeBSD can not act as a domain controller for an Microsoft AD. And this is something you would need in a company full of Windows boxen. And don't tell me I can throw away Windows and install FreeBSD on hundreds of clients (with so varying hardware that even Windows has problems sometimes). Replacing the Windows 2008 server with a FreeBSD box without loosing functionality? Are you sure you really meant that? Just checking again before starting spitting out things where FreeBSD can not replace Windows server. Bye, Nejc ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, March 20, 2008 16:18, Nejc koberne wrote: everything you run on windows can be run on Freebsd and more. Huh? AFAIK FreeBSD can not act as a domain controller for an Microsoft AD. AD is nothing more than a big database accessible over LDAP. You connect to the LDAP database, and when you are authenticated you get a kerberos token. Clients use SRV records to check for AD services. SRV Records are supported by BIND. It is possible to run AD and have your DNS/AD zones on a BIND DNS server. I believe you can even find whitepapers from Microsoft for this. Of course certain features are Microsoft specific. And this is something you would need in a company full of Windows boxen. And don't tell me I can throw away Windows and install FreeBSD on hundreds of clients (with so varying hardware that even Windows has problems sometimes). Xorg + openoffice? Why not? Of course the TCO will increase, training etc. It is simpler for the majority of us to stick to windows. Replacing the Windows 2008 server with a FreeBSD box without loosing functionality? Are you sure you really meant that? Just checking again before starting spitting out things where FreeBSD can not replace Windows server. yes. I meant that. We are talking out of the box Windows 2008. What kind of functionality are you talking about? At work I use windows a lot. Windows 2003 R2, SCCM, SQL 2005, SCOM, Exchange 2007 and all the other latest stuff from Microsoft. But for all these applications I can use also Freebsd and applications found in ports. Besides, the point was that the TS wanted to start using somethign else than windows to learn more about OS in general. PPl stick to Windows because they are afraid for change and a learning curve. Bye, Nejc Bye Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:32:08PM -0800, Donald Laniohan wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Reasonably easy stuff that'd teach you something useful and *be* immediately useful, all at the same time, would be: 1. Set up a document management server using Subversion. The idea is that you commit a directory you use for your personal documents to a version control system so that whenever you update the documents, you can have both the current and all previous versions recoverable from the server in case of disaster or a desire to roll back some changes you've made. A Google search string that should help for getting it set up is: subversion document management Since it's probably not cheating to have someone point you directly at a link for something on MS Windows, I'll just give you a direct link to an article I wrote a while back about setting up TortoiseSVN on MS Windows. TortoiseSVN is a client for Subversion, and can be used to make use of your personal document management server from a Microsoft Windows client, if you don't have a FreeBSD desktop or laptop system available. The URL is: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-3513_11-6172851.html 2. Set up a backup server. There are several excellent tools for this that automate most of the process. Popular choices include Backula, rsync, and dump. With some tools, you may want to schedule their operation by use of cron -- which means you'll probably be learning at least two separate tools. Since there are so many different means of setting up a backup server, I'll leave it to you to figure out what search strings to use. 3. Set up a remote filesystem integrity auditing server. Tools such as mtree, Tripwire, and rsync can all be used for this purpose. I've even written articles about the use of these tools for these purposes. You should be able to find them with Google search strings like the following: mtree integrity auditing rsync integrity auditing tripwire integrity auditing I chose these three server types in particular because: 1. They're things you can't do very effectively on MS Windows without tracking down third party software to buy, copy, or download via your browser to install on the system with great annoyance and difficulty. 2. They're relatively easy (with the possible exception of using tripwire or getting really fancy with the configuration of some of these), unlike other things MS Windows doesn't do so well (like setting up a stateful router/firewall, which can easily get fairly complex). 3. I've done them all, and they're all only a very brief shell command away from installing on the system (assuming you have the full CD set or a broadband Internet connection). 4. None of them require use of the X Window System, so you can set them all up and manage them using nothing more than a command shell via SSH. 5. They can all be immediately useful for you, whereas something like a firewall you're setting up without a specific need for a firewall system probably cannot. NOTES: 1. I haven't mentioned the single most useful bit of help you can get for finding out how to get things running in FreeBSD. I'll give you a hint, though; FreeBSD is the OS whose user documentation is the absolute best, in my experience. I haven't used all available OSes, of course, but I've used quite a few. 2. I can't swear that the results you get from the above recommended Google search strings will give you the information you need. They're just ideas off the top of my head for how to get started on searching. I have not tested those search strings for these purposes. 3. Anything I intentionally leave out of this email that might be helpful (such as URLs that lead directly to various resources that give step-by-step instructions on achieving certain ends with FreeBSD), I left out because I wouldn't want to be accused of cheating by simply handing over the answers when you have obviously been given a challenge by your brother. The content of this email is meant to
Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
Hey Patrick, AD is nothing more than a big database accessible over LDAP. You connect to the LDAP database, and when you are authenticated you get a kerberos token. Clients use SRV records to check for AD services. SRV Records are supported by BIND. It is possible to run AD and have your DNS/AD zones on a BIND DNS server. I believe you can even find whitepapers from Microsoft for this. Of course certain features are Microsoft specific. So you are saying that merely setting up an OpenLDAP server with proper DNS configuration and Kerberos authentication could replace Microsoft AD controller? How about a group of controllers with all the failover features? Group policies? Are you sure you could do that just with a bit of tweaking? If there are Microsoft specific features, than FreeBSD can't do anything Windows server does and more. I am really skeptic about joining a Vista into such a domain. I would really love to see ONE guy who achieves that. To _completely_ replace Windows server with all its features with FreeBSD Anyone? Xorg + openoffice? Why not? Of course the TCO will increase, training etc. It is simpler for the majority of us to stick to windows. Sorry, but OpenOffice is more featureless than MS Office 2007. There are things which you can do with MS Office so MUCH easily than with OpenOffice. For feature comparison see: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480 Not to mention performance issues with OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/ms2007vsooo2.pdf And not to mention, that running Xorg prevents a company from running many other software (specific to some environment, for example here in Slovenia we have many small companies which develop various business software - from business directories to phone books, dictionaries, ... practically none of them can run under Windows). Being a company it is difficult to choose where you live. You could say just don't run that software but I can't say that to users. Because they need that stuff. yes. I meant that. We are talking out of the box Windows 2008. What kind of functionality are you talking about? The most important thing: we are talking about ordinary users not a bunch of math professors who want to run every application from a shell. And those users want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. The problem of mail is then cut to so many little pieces that it may affect user efficiency. The problem with concatenating so many opensource products is that it is hard to make them work together like a charm. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). How about group policies? How would you do that with FreeBSD server? Group policies are THE thing you need when managing greater amount of workstations. At work I use windows a lot. Windows 2003 R2, SCCM, SQL 2005, SCOM, Exchange 2007 and all the other latest stuff from Microsoft. But for all these applications I can use also Freebsd and applications found in ports. Probably you use it more than I do, I really run FreeBSD servers mostly. And I have problems with providing nice-packaged, easy-to-use, all-in-one software to users who are used to that. I use FreeBSD/OS mostly because it is free of charge and because it is quite costumisable. If MS products would be free of charge, I would probably switch to them in most cases. I would just keep the OS scene for our math professors, because you just _can't_ use non-OS software at universities. :) Besides, the point was that the TS wanted to start using somethign else than windows to learn more about OS in general. PPl stick to Windows because they are afraid for change and a learning curve. I totally agree here. And I agree that it's good to check other things too, even if it is for learning only. Not only good, I think it is necessary for a good admin. I just don't agree with the statement, that Windows servers are completely inferior to FreeBSD and you could replace all of them with FreeBSD boxen. If that would be possible, I would do it already. I really am a FreeBSD guy, I run it for more than 6 years now and I like it a lot. But I learned to be reasonable and not to say that it is in every way superior to everything else in the world. Still just talking, not fighting. Bye, Nejc ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
Hiya, On Thu, March 20, 2008 17:50, Nejc koberne wrote: Hey Patrick, AD is nothing more than a big database accessible over LDAP. You connect to the LDAP database, and when you are authenticated you get a kerberos token. Clients use SRV records to check for AD services. SRV Records are supported by BIND. It is possible to run AD and have your DNS/AD zones on a BIND DNS server. I believe you can even find whitepapers from Microsoft for this. Of course certain features are Microsoft specific. So you are saying that merely setting up an OpenLDAP server with proper DNS configuration and Kerberos authentication could replace Microsoft AD controller? How about a group of controllers with all the failover features? Group policies? Are you sure you could do that just with a bit of tweaking? If there are Microsoft specific features, than FreeBSD can't do anything Windows server does and more. I am really skeptic about joining a Vista into such a domain. I would really love to see ONE guy who achieves that. To _completely_ replace Windows server with all its features with FreeBSD Anyone? Failover is nothing more than multi master replication and querying a DNS server for the nearest server which contains an AD database. If the first record fails try another one, if that fails try another one. This is how locating AD servers work. Also why would you want to have a Vista machine in your Freebsd AD domain ;-) You should be running Xorg, Gnome, KDE or whatever, authenticating against the Freebsd server. Thinking about it. What about Radius, isnt that already a system that allows you to manage logons network wise? Xorg + openoffice? Why not? Of course the TCO will increase, training etc. It is simpler for the majority of us to stick to windows. Sorry, but OpenOffice is more featureless than MS Office 2007. There are things which you can do with MS Office so MUCH easily than with OpenOffice. For feature comparison see: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480 Not to mention performance issues with OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/ms2007vsooo2.pdf And not to mention, that running Xorg prevents a company from running many other software (specific to some environment, for example here in Slovenia we have many small companies which develop various business software - from business directories to phone books, dictionaries, ... practically none of them can run under Windows). I completely agree with OpenOffice. Thing is that MIcrosoft has been defined the de facto standard. And yes to have the same features in OpenOffice as in Microsoft you will have to install more applications. Dont forget emulators. If you run a 16bit app on windows xp you run in an emulator. There is even an option telling windows xp which version of dos/windows to emulate. Being a company it is difficult to choose where you live. You could say just don't run that software but I can't say that to users. Because they need that stuff. I agree. Business comes first. But users will be used with what they get as long as it does the job, and b, if it does it fast. yes. I meant that. We are talking out of the box Windows 2008. What kind of functionality are you talking about? The most important thing: we are talking about ordinary users not a bunch of math professors who want to run every application from a shell. And those users want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. The problem of mail is then cut to so many little pieces that it may affect user efficiency. The problem with concatenating so many opensource products is that it is hard to make them work together like a charm. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). Spam? What about filtering all the spam into a folder in the mailbox of a user. Microsoft calls this junk filter/mail. Then run every night a script which feeds the content of that folder into a spamassassin database. I run my mailserver onto the Mailtoaster found on www.tnpi.biz and it learns spam full automatic. Microsoft and spam? They dont have a proper spam solution. You had to buy expensive addons for exchange. I believe with forefront that his has changed but I have no personal experience with this. I do agree that microsoft has the benefit of everything together where you will have to install port and port and package to end up with the same result. How about group policies? How would you do that with FreeBSD server? Group policies are THE thing you need when managing greater amount of workstations.
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it While the other advice is good, I'd just set up an Apache web server if I were you. It's one of the simpler tasks to take on, and you'll find lots and lots of assistance on this via Google. Another, possibly even easier, option is to set up a shell server. Just install the OS, enable sshd and add some users. You could argue that it's a secure file transfer server (load up WinSCP on a Windows box and show off just how 133t your are) The handbook is going to be your best guide initially: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. To add to the Patrick's list: make it a DAAP music server. See mt-daapd: $ cat /usr/ports/audio/mt-daapd/pkg-descr daapd scans a directory for music files and makes them available via the Apple proprietary protocol DAAP. DAAP clients can browse the directory and retrieve individual files, either by streaming or by downloading them. WWW: http://mt-daapd.sourceforge.net/ -- Colin Brace Amsterdam http://lim.nl ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:32:08PM -0800, Donald Laniohan wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Good for your brother. First thing to do is get on the FreeBSD website: http://www.freebsd.org/ and start reading.Especially read the handbook and things about installing and setting up FreeBSD. Then put some stuff on it, such as browser (Firefox, probably), web server (Apache), office tools (OpenOffice) and maybe a few games from /usr/ports and learn to use those. You might want to add database (MySQL), interpreter (Perl, PHP) and other stuff as needed. Have fun. jerry Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:40:53AM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:32:08PM -0800, Donald Laniohan wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Good for your brother. First thing to do is get on the FreeBSD website: http://www.freebsd.org/ and start reading.Especially read the handbook and things about installing and setting up FreeBSD. Then put some stuff on it, such as browser (Firefox, probably), web server (Apache), office tools (OpenOffice) and maybe a few games from /usr/ports and learn to use those. You might want to add database (MySQL), interpreter (Perl, PHP) and other stuff as needed. I forgot to mention and should add, FreeBSD comes with Email (sendmail) ready to go, just turn it on, firewall, and with X-windows configured, a good windows server, plus there are thousands of other utilities, relevant for specific needs, such as xv, xfig graphics and sounds programs, etc. jerry Have fun. jerry Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 09:18:25AM +0100, Nejc Škoberne wrote: everything you run on windows can be run on Freebsd and more. Huh? AFAIK FreeBSD can not act as a domain controller for an Microsoft AD. And this is something you would need in a company full of Windows boxen. You're thinking of it from the wrong direction. FreeBSD can serve the same role to other Unix and Linux boxen that MS Windows can to other MS Windows systems. And don't tell me I can throw away Windows and install FreeBSD on hundreds of clients (with so varying hardware that even Windows has problems sometimes). Why not? There's hardware on which FreeBSD will run and MS Windows will not, y'know. It goes both ways. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Isaac Asimov: Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
It's been my experience that finding drivers for hardware created for open source operating systems by developers within the communities is quite easy, while such community doesn't exist for windows and you are 100% reliant on the vendor to supply working drivers. If they supply crap drivers, go out of business and stop providing any, etc, you are simply out of luck, while with an open source model it is likely that someone will have kept development going if the vendor ever even did produce drivers for those systems. There's very little in the way of modern hardware that isn't supported by FreeBSD. The one time I ever ran into unsupported hardware, a quick update of -STABLE brought the necessary support in the driver. The fact is that political BS aside, for 90% of workers, FreeBSD/KDE/openoffice/firefox will meet their needs just as well as windows, and in fact if you start with something like PC-BSD --- Chad Perrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 09:18:25AM +0100, Nejc Å koberne wrote: everything you run on windows can be run on Freebsd and more. Huh? AFAIK FreeBSD can not act as a domain controller for an Microsoft AD. And this is something you would need in a company full of Windows boxen. You're thinking of it from the wrong direction. FreeBSD can serve the same role to other Unix and Linux boxen that MS Windows can to other MS Windows systems. And don't tell me I can throw away Windows and install FreeBSD on hundreds of clients (with so varying hardware that even Windows has problems sometimes). Why not? There's hardware on which FreeBSD will run and MS Windows will not, y'know. It goes both ways. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Isaac Asimov: Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Donald Laniohan skrev: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. The answer is - nothing. Both are operating systems for computers and have unlimited possibilities. It's a matter of time and curiosity. Look at it like this: Windows: Easy things - short time to learn and do Hard things - proprietary stuff - long time to learn and do FreeBSD Easy things - longer time than above to learn and do Hard things - if you get through the easy stuff - it's a doodle If you're curious enough, you'll find time to master both. And then the next thing you get curious of and so on. On my behalf I started by trying FreeBSD some 10 odd years ago and noticed that it then vastly outperformed Windows for some of the things I used it for. Another thing was the incredible stability. Been hooked ever since. These days I've heard that Mac OSX is built on part of *BSD - must be a reason somewhere As for resources the starting point was in the thread - that'd be www.freebsd.org of course and here's some more: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/73 - All hail Dru Lavigne! http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ http://freebsdhowtos.com/ http://www.freebsd.org/projects/index.html http://tomclegg.net/examples http://freebsd.peon.net/ http://www.freshports.org/ http://freebsd.teekoo.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpd/ http://www.freebsddiary.org/ http://www.bsd.org/ ...and of course www.google.com. Just my nickels worth. /Roger ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:50:34AM +0100, Nejc Škoberne wrote: So you are saying that merely setting up an OpenLDAP server with proper DNS configuration and Kerberos authentication could replace Microsoft AD controller? How about a group of controllers with all the failover features? Group policies? Are you sure you could do that just with a bit of tweaking? If there are Microsoft specific features, than FreeBSD can't do anything Windows server does and more. I am really skeptic about joining a Vista into such a domain. I would really love to see ONE guy who achieves that. To _completely_ replace Windows server with all its features with FreeBSD Anyone? Full AD parity is expected with the release of Samba 4: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035-6053709.html WINS capability is already available in ports with the samba4wins port, by the way. In addition to that, as I pointed out in another email, FreeBSD can *easily* provide all the same functionality -- though MS Windows clients may not support all the necessary protocols and client applications needed to take full advantage of that functionality in some cases. In fact, FreeBSD supports software that does a far better job of being a server or client in an MS Windows network than MS Windows does of being a server or client in a BSD Unix network. Sorry, but OpenOffice is more featureless than MS Office 2007. There are things which you can do with MS Office so MUCH easily than with OpenOffice. For feature comparison see: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480 1. George Ou is a notorious MS Windows bigot, and I've had run-ins with him before (we both write professionally for the same corporate family of websites, though each under differing circumstances from the other). You can pretty much take anything he says with a grain of salt and still have room to be amazed at some of the nonsense he spouts. 2. I, among many others, have given George Ou's poor benchmarking methodologies a pretty thorough reaming on several occasions in the past. Just looking at some of the charts he presents should make his biases and lack of ability to isolate variables pretty obvious (like the fact that, when comparing Linux and MS Windows performance, he runs different software on them for the benchmarks rather than using the same software on both when there are both MS Windows and Linux ports of the software). 3. His numbers tend to differ significantly from those of anyone else who has roughly duplicated his tests. You should look to better sources for something to back your arguments. Not to mention performance issues with OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/product/docs/ms2007vsooo2.pdf The first chart is inaccurate. Last I checked, OO.o comes with Impress, for instance -- so the presentation player line is mis-marked, unless presentation player has some meaning with which I'm not familiar. Perhaps it means that OO.o doesn't come with a crippled form of Impress while MS Office comes with a crippled form of PowerPoint. The rest of that 28 page PDF pretty much looks like a tie in terms of features. Then, there are matters like hardware requirements (far more stringent for MS Windows), cost (obvious), standards compliance (clear win for OO.o), the ability to integrate with third-party applications (a less clear win for OO.o), and license restrictions. I don't know why you linked to that PDF for performance issues, though. There's nothing in there that speaks directly of performance, and the only indirect mention is the more high-performance minimum hardware requirements for MS Windows. Of course, I'm not saying everyone can just automatically do without MS Office without making some sacrifices -- but most people can do so, and are in fact making sacrifices if they *don't* live without it. The most important thing: we are talking about ordinary users not a bunch of math professors who want to run every application from a shell. And those users want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. The problem of mail is then cut to so many little pieces that it may affect user efficiency. The problem with concatenating so many opensource products is that it is hard to make them work together like a charm. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). You don't have to run everything from a shell with FreeBSD. What do you think this is -- 1994? Even manpages can be accessed with a GUI application. Microsoft does *not* provide everything people need. When someone uses
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 06:16:35PM +0800, Gelsema, P (Patrick) wrote: If I had the time I would have tried building an network with Active Directory running on a Freebsd server. Probably would have failed due to some microsoft specific thing. Point is still that all the features are available on Freebsd. Samba 4 will provide the last pieces of the puzzle to be able to completely replace MS Windows servers in AD domains, apparently. Of course, I can't swear to it until it has been officially released, but that's the plan. Until then, FreeBSD can only *mostly* replace MS Windows server functionality in an AD domain. On the other hand, FreeBSD can not only provide equivalent functionality in a Unix network (any one of several types), but can do a whole lot more, as long as you don't specifically require an AD domain. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Leon Festinger: A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
You could make it a video game server. That's why I set up a FreeBSD server. I run games/iourbanterror, but there are other games you could run. On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Replacing Windows with FreeBSD (was: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...)
On Fri, March 21, 2008 00:39, Chad Perrin wrote: On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:50:34AM +0100, Nejc Å koberne wrote: So you are saying that merely setting up an OpenLDAP server with proper DNS configuration and Kerberos authentication could replace Microsoft AD controller? How about a group of controllers with all the failover features? Group policies? Are you sure you could do that just with a bit of tweaking? If there are Microsoft specific features, than FreeBSD can't do anything Windows server does and more. I am really skeptic about joining a Vista into such a domain. I would really love to see ONE guy who achieves that. To _completely_ replace Windows server with all its features with FreeBSD Anyone? Full AD parity is expected with the release of Samba 4: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035-6053709.html WINS capability is already available in ports with the samba4wins port, by the way. WINS is required mostly for Browsing networks, Master browser selection and Netbios connections (the infamous 13x ports). However Microsoft is really trying to get rid of Netbios connections and only have made it available for backwards compatibility. If I aint mistaken port used for file connections is somewhere in the 400 range. It is definitely not required for a full Windows Domain and for file-sharing. In addition to that, as I pointed out in another email, FreeBSD can *easily* provide all the same functionality -- though MS Windows clients may not support all the necessary protocols and client applications needed to take full advantage of that functionality in some cases. In fact, FreeBSD supports software that does a far better job of being a server or client in an MS Windows network than MS Windows does of being a server or client in a BSD Unix network. snap/snap The most important thing: we are talking about ordinary users not a bunch of math professors who want to run every application from a shell. And those users want to use things nicely. For example, let's look at the mail system. You could put a Postfix+amavisd-new+spamassassin+Horde+postfixadmin+ ... bla bla stuff on your FreeBSD server (I actually run this on many servers). But in that webmail, you are not able to manage your spam quarantine for example - you have to logout of Horde and login to Maia Mailguard (before you have to install that too), which is complicated for users. The problem of mail is then cut to so many little pieces that it may affect user efficiency. The problem with concatenating so many opensource products is that it is hard to make them work together like a charm. Microsoft usually (!) provides that (naturally, because it produces all those pieces). You don't have to run everything from a shell with FreeBSD. What do you think this is -- 1994? Even manpages can be accessed with a GUI application. Microsoft does *not* provide everything people need. When someone uses a piece of software that isn't produced by Microsoft, chances are good that any MS software will have been designed specifically to make it difficult to interoperate. Meanwhile, a lot of open source software interoperates very well. Sure, if you limit yourself to nothing but MS software, you might get really good integration -- but that's at the cost of reduced security (thanks to lack of privilege separation and the ubiquitous use of IE's rendering engine for pretty much every single application Microsoft produces) and refusing to use a lot of software that Microsoft doesn't offer. I find it really hard to change, finetune settings on windows. Changing default ports eg. The standard tools provided are limited and there is no default. THink about netsh and net commands. Also security wise. You need to give more permissions to an account to do something than you should on Freebsd. Chrooted applications for instance. How about group policies? How would you do that with FreeBSD server? Group policies are THE thing you need when managing greater amount of workstations. I'd provide such functionality using Unix tools rather than Microsoft tools. Problem solved. I just don't agree with the statement, that Windows servers are completely inferior to FreeBSD and you could replace all of them with FreeBSD boxen. If that would be possible, I would do it already. I don't think anyone said that MS Windows servers are completely inferior to FreeBSD -- and while you *could* replace all of them with FreeBSD boxen, it's probably a good idea to make that a gradual migration in many cases. Agree completely. I really am a FreeBSD guy, I run it for more than 6 years now and I like it a lot. But I learned to be reasonable and not to say that it is in every way superior to everything else in the world. When did anyone say that FreeBSD was in every way superior to everything else in the world? You must be reading a different discussion than the one
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Hello, 2008/3/20, Nerius Landys [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You could make it a video game server. That's why I set up a FreeBSD server. I run games/iourbanterror, but there are other games you could run. And could FreeBSD be used to become a streaming internet radio station? Has anyone been doing something like that? I am very interested to hear and hopefully it is still within the topic here... Thanks! -- Zbigniew Szalbot ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Written by Zbigniew Szalbot on 03/20/08 12:29 Hello, 2008/3/20, Nerius Landys [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You could make it a video game server. That's why I set up a FreeBSD server. I run games/iourbanterror, but there are other games you could run. And could FreeBSD be used to become a streaming internet radio station? Has anyone been doing something like that? I am very interested to hear and hopefully it is still within the topic here... Thanks! Why not? There are open source streaming audio services that are available as FreeBSD ports. I run and icecast server on my box at home with ices stream providers to listen to my music remotely. I'm sure there are other streaming audio services that are just as neat too. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Sure, check out the icecast and darkice ports. Icecast is a server, darkice is a client. There're also some other useful ports like icegenerator (automatic mp3 streaming client software). Take care, mdh --- Zbigniew Szalbot [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, 2008/3/20, Nerius Landys [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You could make it a video game server. That's why I set up a FreeBSD server. I run games/iourbanterror, but there are other games you could run. And could FreeBSD be used to become a streaming internet radio station? Has anyone been doing something like that? I am very interested to hear and hopefully it is still within the topic here... Thanks! -- Zbigniew Szalbot ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
For a kick, tell you brother that free BSD is no good. Install linux on the server and start your own consulting company! I mean seriously! 14 replies to a thread about nothing. Let it die everyone! On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 3:32 AM, Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
Written by Edward Capriolo on 03/20/08 13:56 For a kick, tell you brother that free BSD is no good. Install linux on the server and start your own consulting company! I mean seriously! 14 replies to a thread about nothing. Let it die everyone! On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 3:32 AM, Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] For an even better kick, don't top-post and allow the adults to have a conversation. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: my brother is making me learn FreeBSD...
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 02:56:02PM -0400, Edward Capriolo wrote: For a kick, tell you brother that free BSD is no good. Install linux on the server and start your own consulting company! I mean seriously! 14 replies to a thread about nothing. Let it die everyone! Hey, you old grouch. Spring is coming. Take a deep breath and enjoy it. jerry On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 3:32 AM, Donald Laniohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My task is to build a BSD server and do something with it. That is all the information he gave me, that, and any questions I have to make Google my best friend, which I have. i remember building my first whitebox, it was a 386 with windows 3.1. I remember when I built my 486 and stole a copy of windows 95. I thought I was a savage. BSD, however, has showed me how juvenile I have been. If I do not master BSD my brother is going to keep me as a desktop support for his windows clients and I want to progress past this. So he's giving me a 1u, and said to put BSD on it and make it do something, im just so stuck in my windows comfort zone I can't think of what I would need a unix server to that I couldn't make windows do for me. I know this is trivial but if somebody could offer any suggestion or resource I, and my career, would greatly appreciate it Donald Laniohan MLAN Consulting San Diego, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
