

Microsoft Stupidity or: Why I learned to stop worrying and love the GPL - smanek

I recently was asked to upgrade some machines for a Medical Center I do some consulting for.<p>I bought a few Dell Power Edges - that came preloaded with Windows Server 2003 Small Business - because I needed the uptime/reliability of server hardware and they needed some proprietary Windows only apps.<p>When I was setting the computers up I had removed all the extraneous services (Active Directory, DNS Server, Exchange Server, etc), for security and performance reasons - and all was good.<p>Well, a week later I get frantic calls that all the servers mysteriously shutdown. After examining the event log I see a notice that:
"The server was shut down because it did not comply with the EULA. For more information, contact Microsoft."<p>In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to shutdown my servers, with no notice, a week later because I had <i>uninstalled</i> the Active Directory server.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555087 for details. In what possible world did someone think this was a good idea?<p>And that is why I now <i>only</i> use open source software whenever possible. I'll gladly pay for it - I just don't want this kind of stupidity and user antagonism in my software.<p>This is exactly like me buying a car and then it shutting down on the highway after a week, because I haven't been using the cup holders enough.
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bayareaguy
Smanek, the center delegated the task of configuring a system to you because
they trusted you to know the interdependencies of the system. However well
meaning, what you actually did was take a tested and validated configuration
from Dell and screw it up a little while trying to make it a little better.
That's a recipe for trouble no matter what kind of software you use.

I think the lessons people should take from your post are

\- If you're going to dick with Microsoft software, be sure and research the
Knowledge Base ahead of time. The number 555087 tells me there are at least
_half a million known things you can screw up_.

\- If it matters that your system is reliable, avoid optimizing a
configuration after it's been validated by the vendor.

\- Always expect a surprise when you give a customer a configuration with
different software.

My mail server is a FreeBSD box. It's been running for 10 years and has been
upgraded several times. Uptime shows

    
    
      12:47PM  up 473 days, 18:21, 17 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    

However just last week someone screwed up mail on it when they installed a new
open source library.

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johns
Maybe you shouldn't have had Small Business Server preinstalled on them if you
didn't want all the features it comes with. You know they sell Windows Server
2003 Standard with none of those features you mentioned installed by default,
right? Pretty sure it's cheaper than SBS too.

~~~
johns
I'm downmodded because the poster didn't do his research and I pointed it out.
Funny.

