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Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception
by ncphil 6y ago
Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception that MS seemed to encourage. As someone who came over from Windows, I knew better. That attitude continues to influence standard practices, hiring and, most importantly, training and education opportunities for Windows admins -- to the detriment of all. I've also had my collisions with Hyper V, and have come away with the same impressions as you have.
- uncledave 6y agoAgreed. I've done both and if you ask me Windows ops is vastly more difficult because everything is brittle, inconsistent and unreliable and rarely repeatable almost all of the time. It requires great skill, determination and persistence to navigate issues like this. Unfortunately as you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and fixing all issues by not changing anything other than replacing everything every few years. There is rarely any day to day admin I see other than planning the next major rollout with some vain hope it'll have less problems than the last one.
- oblio 6y agoI don't know if I'd call it brittle, I would call it super complex (when you get into wmic & friends) and harder to get info online, compared to Linux, because everyone has to tinker with Linux while only a minority of power sysadmins dig that deep into Windows.
- mst 6y agoI've worked with good windows admins. I have so much respect for them.
- pas 6y agoIt's not that brittle, MS backward-compatible supports a lot of APIs, but ... the upper layers on top are just vendor-ware shit 99% of the time. (Even/especially their own config/setup wizards/GUIs.) I mean a bash script that handles no errors and outputs nothing just screams madness. The same thing wrapped in a .MSI .. well, you'll never know what hit your, and if it's your job to somehow unfuck this, it's virtually a piece of literal hell itself, slowly rotting and eroding people's soul and mind.
- samb1729 6y ago> Unfortunately as you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and fixing all issues by not changing anything other than replacing everything every few years. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. It seems like every organisation I’ve been part of which has a significant Windows presence is either static or planning a rollout of and migration to some new magical enterprise software that replaces the old enterprise software they purchased and this time it’ll definitely make everything better. It’s amazing to me how much money gets spent on per-seat licensing for what essentially amounts to no noticeable improvement for anyone involved. But sure, I’m sure this company-wide spyware of choice will be the one that finally means we can just stop caring about security or provisioning machines, right folks? It’s like the folks doing it have mastered the art of finding busywork that’s just complicated enough that folks signing the cheques can’t really tell they’re burning money. In that sense it’s beautiful I suppose. Just, erm, ignore the fact a dozen different developers have essentially root access to production databases... at least they can’t install software!
- pram 6y agoMCSE was a punchline 20 years ago so this is a misconception almost as old as the entire profession of Windows Admins.
- Zardoz84 6y agoThe only situation when BTRFS breaked badly to me, was when we run guests on Hyper-V .