My chacha (Ramesh) (father’ brother) owns a pharmaceutical company. Another chacha (Ravi) is good programmer and system analysist. Ravi chacha made a software for this company. The software was sort of ERP software and completed all major needs. He kept increasing functionalities to it, and it grew like anything. Finally Ravi chacha found it hard to keep it updated (the software was DOS based). So, we started looking for a proper commercial ERP solution for our needs. We bought a software, but it finally didn’t work out good. For that software we *bought* Windows Server 2008.

Now then we had windows server 2008, we wanted to use it. So, I was given the task of using it for thin clients and for whatever purpose it can be used. And considering that I didn’t have anything to do, and since it was a family work, I started working on it. Working on Windows Server reminded me of days when I was shifting from Windows to Linux (those were the days of FC4, and hence pretty difficult it was to use linux and that even behind proxy). It was pretty difficult shift. From linux where everything could be configured using a configuration file to windows where everything has to be done with a bloody mouse. From linux, where you never restart your machine to Windows where you reboot the machine doesn’t matter what small thing you have done. Its darn difficult.  I accept a lot of time was wasted because I was learning how to use Windows Machine (Working on a machine made for dumb people makes me dumb), but still is windows any good for server purpose? I accept Windows XP is a good OS for general people ( of course I am ignoring that it was made by an evil company and that it’s closed source).

And more to it, Windows Server recommends that you run each service on a different machine. Are you kidding me? I have to have different machine and different licenses of Windows Server for each service? I run Terminal Server, Licensing server, Domain Controller, SQL Server, DHCP server, VPN.  6 machine… haha

And then, the computer has to have a very particular sort of name. And not only that, different MS products may not accept those names. If you change your server machine name, other services might not change the name. And hence different services will respond with different names.

I was installing SQL Server 2008, and it refused to install saying some “collation not found” error. I tried changing it, but it will crash with some random error. Even fresh installation doesn’t work properly, and they say that installtion on linux is difficult. My windows server on which I tried installing sql server is freshly installed, so I didn’t expect any errors.

If you want to run terminal server for remote desktop, you have to buy Client Access Licenses. And these licenses will come directly from US, and hence takes a month to arrive. Such a conservative system.

I have no idea what to do. Shifting the company from Windows to linux shouldn’t be that difficult, but people are afraid. If anything good happens, I will post here.