Service Pack 1

Firstly, thankyou to the hundreds of people that took the time and effort to e-mail me with comments - sorry I can't mention you all individually. I'd like to especially thank that chap that wrote a 3 page tirade of abuse on how I must be a "fukcing[sic] moron" to be running Linux. I very much like to see this level of mental agility from Windows users.

This page is a follow up to the recent page posted on this site regarding the Microsoft Linux Myths whitepaper. Seems we/I made a few mistakes in what we/I said. I'd like to clear some of those up here. If you see spot anything else, please mail me. So, in no particular order...

• It turns out that NTFS is a journaling/transactional filesystem - this was news to me especially. If the system lives on an NTFS partition it should usually boot from a consistant state after a reboot/crash and so a filesystem check is not required. If the system partition is on a FAT partition (a not uncommon practise) then the disk may need to be checked on boot.
  
  
• Many readers asked me to point out that NT does not support APM or FAT32 out of the box.
  
  
• In the section of delegating administrative responsibility, we glaringly left out mentioning the Linux 'sudo' command which permits ordinary users to execute commands as though they were logged in as the root user. This can be applied to any script or binary file.
  
  
• Some people also asked me to point out the lack of scripting capabilities in NT for automating administrative tasks. This is broadly correct however Perl is available for NT too and makes automation relatively easy. 50/50 on that one.
  
  
• Microsoft claimed that IIS outperformed Apache on SSL transactions. One reader asks what the encryption strength (key length) was set to for this test. NT comes in two flavours 48bit (for export) or 128bit for use in the states. I didn't have time to find any specific information on the default key lengths for Apache/Stronghold. If anyone can comment on this, I'd like to hear from you.
  
  
  
• Many people thought our comments on NT 4's C2 rating weren't strong enough and requested that I point out that NT is not C2 compliant when attached to any network, never mind the Internet. Noted.
  
  
• On the 99.9% uptime claims, I'll quote one readers comment verbatim. "If you calculate 99.9% uptime, that is 0.365 days downtime per year or 525.60 minutes downtime per year. To be generous, I'll allow each reboot to be 5minutes which means approx one reboot every 3 days."

I'll be updating this page as I find more bits'n'pieces. Bear with me.

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Last update: 19-10-1999