A friend of mine is playing around with a website that he's been building. He's decided to take his old AMD K62 box with 128MB of memory and dedicate it as his test webserver. Now here's where the problem comes in. He absolutely swears by running Windows 2000 on this computer, and argues that linux would be too complicated for him to learn. Now linux may have a steep learning curve, but it is the ideal choice when running a server with limited capacity.

So he now has Windows 2000 installed on the computer, and it runs like a bloated hog. I'm actually surprised that he chose to use VNC as opposed to Remote Desktop for accessing the computer, though I tell him it's an unsecured connection, and should be tunnled through a ssh session. He has the VNC port open on his router, so that I can tinker around on the computer if he needs any help. If he does ask for help though, I'm gonna tell him to install linux first. There's no way I'm working on that box remotely over VNC, and with the system paging like crazy just to open the start menu.

Even trying to view a webpage on that computer is a choir in itself, as you wait for the system to swap enough memory out just to render a few tables. If I had my way, I would have installed slackware without a GUI, and just the services that I need. Apache, FTPd, SSHd, PHP, MySQL, etc. I then would have set up a limited account, and served the pages from that users htdocs directory. My friend prefers to run everything in administrator mode, and all I can do is roll my eyes. He's MCSE certified, and a big Microsoft fanboy.

He even wanted to use this box as his first line of defense, between the internet connection and his router, and I'm glad I was at least able to convince him otherwise on that matter.

And he wonders why he gets virii, and spyware all the time.

I just don't know. I had to get that out. It's been driving me up the wall!

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Obedience brings victory
Victory is life
That is the order of things

i think you did.

I read all that looking to where i could give advice but...
you dont need it LOL

Toward the end i was beginning to think..."This guy just needs to vent"
Got to the bottom. Yup.

Perhaps you meant "chore" instead of "choir"? Spell-checking can be fun!
"A fool and control of his computer are soon parted."
He's not completely hopeless then.
A couple more whacks with a cluestick ought to do it. Keep trying. I hope you can convince him.

One thought: given all the thrashing and swapping you say is happening, is your friend sure there is no rootkit on his system already relaying spam and other goodies?

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I don't currently have it running from its last rebuild (got lazy), but my linux box is a P-200 (of the MMX school, not the other one.) Very nearly the last run of it's kind.

It sports 64 megs of RAM and whatever hard drives I could scrounge and fit into it. (Largest, IIRC, is 4.something gigs.)

Made it a sweet light web (apache) and pop-before-smtp mail server (sendmail) a few years ago, with very little effort on my part to make it so. Reasonably responsive so long as I was careful not to host the next Hamster Dance or Farkable site. (I made the server throttle itself to ten web connections at a time, and only so much bandwidth so as to not cripple my connection or get noticed by my ISP.)

Went with Red Hat before, but had to go with slackware (or was it debian) this time around because no one else had default text-mode drivers for my old (non-standard) Gateway 14in monitor.

There's no way in FSM's green earth a box like this (nor a K6) could run Windows 2000 well enough to even pretend to be a server.

I have no advice for your friend. It's been my unfortunate experience that MSCEs tend to get married with the product and lose a great deal of flexibility when it comes to finding solutions. What makes it unfortunate, from my perspective, is that the managers with the cash tend to buy into the marketting and my projects nearly always get swept along in the wake. While I've occasionally recommended Microsoft as the better* solution for a problem, I'm pretty sure I've yet to encounter a situation where Microsoft lock-in was even remotely beneficial**.

(* I'm aware of the whole good-better-best thing, but "better" has the colloquial baggage I'm looking for.)

(** To anyone but Microsoft, anyway.)

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Yes I did.

He's a great guy and all, just stuck in his ways a bit I suppose.
Ah yes! I had it stuck in my head that the two words were spelled the same.
Remember the Blaster worm? It propagated to any Windows 2000/XP system that was freshly installed within minutes of connecting to the internet. This was pre XP SP1, and one of the major reasons that Microsoft added firewall software to the first service pack. If you weren't behind a router or using a 3rd party software firewall before connecting to the internet, you were sealing your fate. My friend also wasted many hours reinstalling because of it.
I haven't scanned his system, but I think one can tell that something is going on when you have popups coming up, and there are no other windows currently open.
Nice. I've been thinking about setting up a linux install on another system that I have kicking around, just to get him to try it out. SSH is our friend, just keep it up to date.
I myself am pretty much locked into Microsoft on my desktop for the applications that I want to run, and the games I want to play. When it comes down to what's best for the job though, I'll consider all options.

__________________
Obedience brings victory
Victory is life
That is the order of things

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "ideal." FreeBSD typically beats up on all the other OSs in terms of uptime.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

Your friend is resistant to change. Linux is a perfectly reasonable desktop alternative, and the best webserver you can can want. We're running Linux here, of course.

Ubuntu and Debian, with apt-get install has made adding and removing software easier than we could hope for. But you still do need to make an investment in time to get up to speed and understand how to do things. Linux can be unfriendly when things aren't working right, or you need to do something really custom.

For your friend, I'd recommend doing an Ubuntu Server installation. It does a nice, secure LAMP stack right from installation. Stick to command line.

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Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today - Free space news delivered by email every weekday.

I recently^* had to look for a new Linux distribution for our servers because RedHat stopped supporting the one we where running, and didn't have any free supported releases.

After a fairly long search we ended up with FreeBSD, and I have to say that I've not been sorry for the move.
The only reason the servers don't have uptimes counted in years is that we had a power failure that lasted longer than the UPS could handle.
The smallest is a PII-350 with 128MB ram which is quite happily serving static webpages quite fast using thttpd, than one had gotten up to 323 days when the power failed

Actually, in my experience, it's exactly when you get beyond the bog standard things that *nix shines. Provided, of course, you're using the configuration files as intended, rather than letting some application alter them for you. If you do the latter, you're probably no better off than the Windows admin who has to navigate a bewildering tree of menus to get to the right undocumented^† option.

Perhaps I'm not the right one to talk though, given that I'll quite happily modify sendmail rewrite rules^‡ if I think they need tweaking.


*) a few years ago.
†) I truly loathe the "What's this?" feature, which will happily tell you that the thing you're asking about is a checkbox but has no intention of telling you what the consequences of checking it are.
‡) Here's one of those: R$* < @ $* .$m. > $* $#smtp $@ $2.$m. $: $1 < @ $2.$m. > $3

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

True. I should have said 'an' instead of 'the' ideal choice. In any case, it's better than using windows on that box.
Quite. Well, I finally managed to get him to make the switch. What it came down to was an incompatibility in the php scripts that he was using. At least part of the problem was poorly written code. It would appear to me that Windows doesn't interpret directory structures the same way that *nix OSes do. Instead of going through every piece of code, and declaring absolute paths in everything, I told him to just install linux already, and he folded. He then said that he should have just listened to me to begin with.

Before I started helping him, he couldn't even get a simple PHP test script to run. He was hammering away at it for over a week before I came over to his place to find out the problem within a matter of hours. Turns out he kept reinstalling windows and apache2triad, when the problem was the fact that he was naming his PHP files with a .html extension. Now I myself don't know very much about PHP, but I'm not going to be reinstalling my OS every single time I hit a roadblock.

He tells me he wants to be a programmer, and how he would enjoy coding. I've done a little bit of C programming myself, and I hate it.

The madness I tell you.

__________________
Obedience brings victory
Victory is life
That is the order of things