Well, at the risk of Lephturn jumping me about it
,....yes most forms of UNIX make a much more stable and secure platform for a server.
UNIX also require much less of an investment in hardware to run.
One of my big issues with MS based OS's, especially in a server environment, is how MS consistently goes against RFC's in thier network implementations. RFC's, for those that are not in the know, define virtually every protocol used on the Internet.
Now we have RFC's to patch the previous RFC's so we can interoperate with MS OS's.
BIND (the name service, used for many, many years...even before MS was around), SMTP, PPP, POP, IMAP, and TCP had to be patched to work around differences in the way MS thought it should work.
Whether intentional or not, it appears MS does not care about standards and are willing to force everyone else to be compliant to them.
Don't get me wrong here. UNIX has had its share of problems over the years, as some of the UNIX's just did not maintain themselves well.
Linux, on the other hand, is a rather amazing OS. Put together by individuals from all over the world, it is amazing how well it conforms to the RFC's.
Overall, I am seeing a trend in MS OS's that originally caused most other OS's to die. MS appears to given up on backward compatibilty. There is good and bad in this. The bad being, software developers are having to go back and rewrite code to work on the new OS's, particularly true of the I/O devices.
The good, it does allow more modern code and interfaces to be implemented, correcting the badly thought out way things were done before. This would not be too bad a deal, if MS would give a copy of the compiler out with the OS, as UNIX does.
UNIX has undergone changes since its inception as well, but the all the development tools come with it. I have source code I wrote over 20 years ago, that runs on UNIX today, but it did require a recompile to do so. Not a big deal for UNIX users.
Try that with MS. I have a complete development system for MS, and it costs, including manuals, about $3,500.00 U.S. to get the tools I am used to getting with UNIX for free. Of course, when you think you are the only game in town, I guess you can do that.
We sell servers at AppLink as well. Part of the deal is a garantee against crashes (i.e., if your server crashes in the first 30 days due to a problem in the software or hardware we will give a 100% refund and you keep the server). We use Linux for the base OS, and have never had to refund anyone the pruchase price. There is no way I would do this with a MS based server.
Our servers at AppLink typically run about 6 months before we reboot them, and those reboots are for upgrades. In 6 years we have never had a software failure with any server. Your mileage may vary. I have about 25 years experience with UNIX, so that expertise goes a long way in configuring a server for long term use and under heavy loads.
Heck, just from a cost standpoint, I cannot figure out why any company would use a MS based server. Try setting up a 1000 user SMTP/POP/IMAP server for under $2,000.00 U.S. with MS. It cannot be done, not legally anyways.
Oy, I do get carried away.
