Re: NT vs Unix

In article <76v86v$qit$1_at_hermes.is.co.za>, "Billy Verreynne" <vslabs_at_onwe.co.za> wrote:
>Dan Morgan wrote in message <36911CD8.946716B7_at_exesolutions.com>...
>
>>NT is less secure
>
>Explain. Unix out of the box is also not secure. What type of security are
>you refering too? The NT Domain concept is an abortion and can easily be
>cracked because of its weak encryption (as proved by L0pht), but why on
>earth use that on a database server box!? Database Security is an Oracle
>issue, not an operating system.

Unix is more secure because it has been around a lot longer than NT and has had most of its holes fixed. NTs main problem is MS did not make security a core issue, consquentally NT is vulerable to attacks that should never have been allowed in the first place (a good number of the attacks on NT are based on similar attacks to Unix years before). Granted some of these vulnerabilities are a result of maintianing backqard compatiablity, but still does not exuse it. In

>
>>NT is less stable
>

Disagree. I have seen rock steady NT systems. And I have seen Unix systems
>that crash a lot. The issue often is hardware and not software. Run an
>operating system on iffy hardware and you are looking for trouble. Does not
>matter how good and robust you may think the operating system may be. The
>scariest instability problems I ever had with Oracle were on Unix. And due
>to the vendor not applying the correct patches to kernel.

NO way! Even with tuning and care, NT is just not up to the stability that can be provided by Unix. Both our sun production and development servers with muliple instances of Oracle have been running nonstop for 22 months, 24 x 7, without a single reboot or crash. Again, the most stable Unix versions have been around longer and have been tuned with stability in mind. MS was unwilling to keep NT in house until it was rock-solid stable, that would have meant too much lost revenue. So we have an operating system that with even with care still needs to be peroidically rebooted. One of our mainframe systems has been ruuning for last 8 years with only 2 outages, totaling 15 minutes! Now that is stable. Several of our unix servers are approaching that goal. Would you put NT in that class.

>>NT is not Y2K compliant
>
>According to MS it is. What's your beef?
>

Not completely

MS has stated the following at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/topics/year2k/product/user_view14889EN.htm

Today, the product is compliant with minor issues

Known Issues:

User Manager Does Not Recognize February 2000 As a Leap Year. Q175093 User Manager and User Manager for Domains will not accept Feb. 29, 2000 as a valid date to expire an account.

Control Panel Date/Time applet. Q183123 The Control Panel Date/Time applet's date displayed may jump ahead one more day than expected. The system date is correct; only the displayed date is wrong.

Custom date properties on Word documents. Q183125 A custom date property of a Word document assumes on short-date (2 digit) input that the century is 1900. This behavior differs from the rest of Office.

 Find File entry fields. Q183123 There are two date entry fields in the Start Menu, Find, Files or Folders, Date Modified tab that will show non-numeric data if the year is greater than 1999.

In addition, there is a minor issue with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02. Please look at the Internet Explorer Product Guide document for detailed information about this minor issue. Received on Fri Jan 08 1999 - 13:04:09 CST