Another Positive Experience With Windows Server 2003
While I’m usually living on the Unix side of live, I sometimes happen to find myself again in the Windows world.
Some may say this is blasphemy, a decent unix admin would never bother in doing Windows, deny the open source idea, be such a scumbag, blablablabla…
But let me tell you one thing: Windows is not that bad after all. Honestly.
Why can I say: Because I’m writing code on Windows, I’m working with Windows (my personal workstation runs PC-BSD however…), I see and I feel when it makes progress. (Still, I’m a unix admin after all…)
My most recent experience was tonight. I went to setup an AD domain controller on my recently acquired Windows Server 2003 (180-day trial license).
I remember how long this took on my testing system (an ancient Celeron 733 with 1gig of RAM) with Windows 2000 just two weeks ago: almost 30 minutes only to initialize a new AD structure.
The very same process on the same machine with Windows Server 2003: not even five minutes! I could not believe this at first so I repeated this after doing a reinstall – with the same result.
Now this is definitely what I call progress, especially considering this kind of old hardware being used!
And for those who may have wondered: the whole purpose to setup the AD domain controller is to see wether an AD-driven LDAP may be merged with OpenLDAP to provide authentication services in a mixed environment. More about this shall be coming soon…
