> > You're probably right, and I should be more proactive in only > > applying patches that apply to my configuration. I should > > also probably be testing the patches on a development server > > first. However, I would rather spend the time doing real > > work than worrying about patches. Why can't Windows patches > > be more pain free like Linux patches? In my experience, they > > are, but I believe many of you have been burned by bad MS > > patches in the past, which is why you feel the need to test > > the patch before applying it. > > Testing the patches should be the MS's job, not ours. > > If it's my job to keep the server running, it's my job to make sure that > patches work. I haven't seen any MS folks coming by my office to test for > me, on my specific servers, with my specific mix of applications and > settings. If you administer servers, this is REAL WORK, regardless of > platform. If I told my friendly local Solaris administrator that he should > just install patches on his production servers without testing them first, > I'd get laughed out of his office. > > For what it's worth to you, I think your emphasis on patching and uptime > are > seriously misplaced. You should be more concerned about configuration > management and unscheduled downtime.
I am concerned with configuration management, and I love the fact that I can edit Apache's config file, test it, commit it to subversion and deploy to production. I have never had unscheduled downtime due to patches. Now, I might've been lucky, or maybe it's the fact that I don' run any more MS crap on my servers that I have to. This includes not running IIS in favor of apache. I don't know about Solaris, but on Linux, patches get installed nightly through up2date or yum on Redhat, and I've never had anything break because of it (nor do I know of anyone else who has). The process also NEVER needs a reboot. I'm not very clear of what you do to test patches anyway. Obviously, unless you have a huge budget, you can't have a duplicate of every server just so you can test patches on it. And if you test it on a development server with one configuration, there is no guarantee that it won't break on a production server with a slightly different configuration. > If you're a developer, you'd much rather be writing code, which brings me > back to my original point - if you're a developer, and you don't want to > be > a server administrator, learning Apache or Linux or whatever can be a > distraction from your REAL WORK. That's really what caused me to react in > the first place. I like Apache. I like Linux. I don't think there's > anything > wrong with using either one. I think in many ways, they're superior to > their > Microsoft counterparts. But the evangelism that accompanies them is often > misguided, I think. It might be a distraction for some people, but I enjoy doing both coding and server management, and I am in a position where I have to be doing both. I would rather not spend time maintaining servers, but spend time adding more functionality. I hate the fact that in windows things tend to break every so often and sometimes require a lot of attention. On linux, although it might be a little more difficult to set things up, at first, once you've set it up, it will pretty much keep working unless you mess with it. > > You're right and rewriting using CF for dynamic content > > probably doesn't make much of a difference, although you > > should agree that it is slower, even by a few milliseconds. > > My point was about static content. Lets say you want to set > > up a sort of proxy server where: http://www.example.com > > actually pulls content from http://www2.example.com. In > > Apache, you would just put in something like: > > > > RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com $ [NC] > > RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www2.example.com/$1 [P] > > > > This will proxy all the requests through www2, while the url > > in the browser will appear as www. It will proxy images, as > > well as any pages. I doubt you can do this with ISAPI > > rewrite, and with CF it would be pretty difficult to do as > > well (if not impossible). Apache handles this type of stuff > > out of the box. > > Why do you doubt that you can do this with ISAPI Rewrite? Because it sure > looks like you can to me: > http://www.isapirewrite.com/docs/ > > I'm pretty sure you can do that with IIRF, too. > Looking at the docs, I wouldn't say the syntax is any easier then mod_rewrite, and by the time I learned it, I would be wondering why I didn't just install Apache instead of spending $99 per box for the license of ISAPI Rewrite. > And of course, I can turn this around to point out the things that IIS has > and Apache doesn't (at least without additional modules): > > - web, GUI and scriptable API management interfaces There is a web interface (webmin). Someone also mentioned a GUI interface. There is no need for API since the configuration is in a text file, which is easy enough to manipulate using any programming language. > - live configuration editing without restart There is a graceful restart option, which just rereads the configuration information without doing an actual restart. > - ability to run ASP/ASP.NET apps mod_mono > - authentication against Active Directory There are many options here, but I might as well give you one recommended by MS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555092 Note that it's even possible to authenticate with Active Directory from Linux. > - support of MOM, SUS/WSUS and third party configuration management tools Apache supports webmin under linux, and I'm sure plenty of control panels under windows as well. It is supported by CF's wsconfig and I'm not exactly sure why you would use SUS/WSUS or MOM with it, but I don't have a lot of experience with those tools. > Now, you might not be interested in any of those things, but that doesn't > mean they're valueless to everyone else. If you are using some tools to manage IIS, that's great. I would rather just keep my configuration in subversion and if I need to manage multiple machines at once, I can easily script it, at least on Linux. 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