8 ms·
Preparing Windows Server Technical Preview for Windows Containers
- revelation 11y agoYes, let's just download this massive powershell script over http. Great idea.
- riquito 11y agoDon't understand the downvotes, it really should have been https
- UK-AL 11y agoArnt these things signed? Powershell has signing capability to verfiy the author is ms.
- mehrdada 11y agoWhat if an exploit is found in the signed copy? Someone else can host the old version which is still signed and supply it to the user. Are they going to revoke the certificate used to sign it entirely?! Not using HTTPS is a sloppy security practice on their side.
- lmz 11y agoLinux packages are signed and commonly served over HTTP by various mirrors. How is this any different?
- revelation 11y agoThey are versioned, of course. You will have to explicitly agree to a downgrade.
- mehrdada 11y agoIdeally, you'd want them to use HTTPS to deliver the packages as well. However, I cut free software distribution some slack, because of massive distributed mirroring and delivery by a number of third parties. For Microsoft, it would be easy: why _not_ use HTTPS and get another line of defense? (update: revelation's comment is insightful; just saw it. I forgot about versioning.)
- Someone1234 11y agoThe host actually responds with a 301 that redirects you to: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Microsoft/Virtualization-Documentation/master/windows-server-container-tools/New-ContainerHost/New-ContainerHost.ps1 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Microsoft/Virtualization-D... If you're worried just enter the above instead, fully HTTPS-ed. Invoke-WebRequest (aliased to wget in this example) follows 301 links unless told not to, so you're actually downloading the script over HTTPS all the time, but someone could still MITM the link shortening service.
- revelation 11y agoAs you note, the redirect breaks all benefits of HTTPS. That can just be trivially stripped. Powershell, in any case, allows for scripts to be signed. Since the script in question is semi-auto-generated in any case, they should just include that as a step in the build. But serving unsigned scripts over HTTP is just beyond the pale.
- eltondegeneres 11y agoWhat's the appeal of using a Windows host?
- malkia 11y agoI've posted about video game tools, but one important non-video games related tooling is the visual studio compiler, linker and the whole plethora of tools there. So if you are Mozilla and want your browser to get recompiled for Windows you might use such a service (I don't actually know whether Mozilla is doing this, just giving an idea)
- shoo 11y agoMaybe you ship a software product to windows, and wish to test it.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoWho _does_ that!?
- nawitus 11y agoMillions of software developers.
- malkia 11y agoLots of video game tools/middleware work only on Windows, and only recently other platforms have been considered like OSX, Linux, and others. AFAIK for OSX the only legal option is colocation - e.g. you provide an actual OSX machine, and it's installed for you somewhere for your use or your team (I'm actually not completely sure there). I'm talking about OSX, since lots of these tools above are released for Windows and OSX, but not for Linux (yet).
- swozey 11y ago.net developers find appeal in it.
- asitov 11y ago
- therealmarv 11y agoSo there are windowsservercore containers. Are they real windows? Can I run them also from Linux?
- josteink 11y agoContainers are not VMs despite often being used as such. Windows will not run Linux-containers and Windows-containers will not run on Linux, just like the same restriction applies the other way around. A container typically runs with the same kernel as the host, and therefore is restricted to be the same type of operating-system.
- therealmarv 11y agoThanks! I'm really curious what a Windows container is capable of. Many Windows programs are dependent on GUIs. I can imagine that Windows containers are a great testing platform. Let's see what else is possible.
- ossreality 11y agoThey're for headless services...
- dragontamer 11y agoAlmost the entirety of ASP.NET and Windows Web Programming can be run headlessly. StackOverflow is entirely built on top of Windows and .NET. Its not necessarily an inefficient platform, despite Window's reputation.
- aikah 11y agoIsn't it supposed to work with Docker ? I thought Docker was *nix only ?
- Sanddancer 11y agoDocker isn't *nix only, MS and Docker have ported it to Windows 10 and Server 2016. You're able to use the same API between the various Docker hosts, but the binary compatibility is much the same as that between Linux and OS X versions of Docker.
- Alupis 11y agocatch { Write-Error $_ } Powershell is fairly new... I'm surprised Microsoft is using `$_` instead of the common (in UNIX) `$?` to represent the current value in the pipe. It's almost like they go out of their way to not conform to anything other OS' have already done.
- dragontamer 11y agoConforms to Perl as "default argument".
- Alupis 11y agoHmm, I didn't realize that (not a Perl guy obviously). Even so, Perl isn't a shell, it's a runtime/language. Whereas powershell is, a shell. I would have expected it to be more UNIX-like in that regard.
- bkeroack 11y agoPowershell is a shell and a fully-fledged language. In that way it is considerably more advanced than bash/sh/csh/ksh/etc.
- helper 11y agoAre you saying that /bin/sh isn't turing complete?
- bkeroack 11y agoNot at all. What I'm saying is that /bin/sh has idiosyncratic, incomplete language syntax and semantics (mostly for historical reasons). For example, variable comparison is not built in but rather is dependent upon the external [ (or test). It would be hard to call a language 'complete' when it doesn't even support variable equality testing. Whatever you think of Windows/MS/etc, Powershell is a decently-well-designed, complete language with a number of useful, convenient constructs. For example, here is a native Powershell hashmap (that can be looped over, etc.): $states = @{"Washington" = "Olympia"; "Oregon" = "Salem"; California = "Sacramento"} Nice, no?
- chris-at 11y agodocker images REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE windowsservercore latest 9eca9231f4d4 30 hours ago 9.613 GB windowsservercore 10.0.10254.0 9eca9231f4d4 30 hours ago 9.613 GB vs REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE alpine latest 31f630c65071 9 weeks ago 5.254 MB Aren't containers supposed to be small(er)?
- aikah 11y agoIs it a container or an image ? it looks like some image for VM with some kind of bootstrapping for linux or something. And what is the license for a Windows Server Core ? Is it possible to find a ELI5 for how it is supposed to work ?
- chris-at 11y agoIt's a container image (output from docker images). see https://msdn.microsoft.com/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/manage_docker https://msdn.microsoft.com/virtualization/windowscontainers/...
- scooley 11y agoDon’t worry. This is an early build and you’ll see things get smaller in future updates :). *I work for Microsoft on these specifically.
- codemac 11y agoNo, they aren't supposed to be anything. Docker added this concept of a "graphdriver" where things are stored as their delta on disk as they assume you'll use many of them. Obviously your first windows container is gonna use up more blocks in that type of storage than a linux container built specifically to be small[0] [0]: http://gliderlabs.viewdocs.io/docker-alpine/ http://gliderlabs.viewdocs.io/docker-alpine/
- CSDude 11y agoFor the ones, that do not want to use Windows/HyperV to prepare and use the VM image: https://gist.github.com/mustafaakin/0cfbc1b4bb346a05a615 https://gist.github.com/mustafaakin/0cfbc1b4bb346a05a615