Nothing to worry about?
Surely most of the code has been rewritten several times over what with all the updates since it was released so it must be completely secure now?
Insight: Have you heard about Windows Server 2003 support?
As organisations using Windows Server 2003 march - perhaps with ill-found confidence - toward the expiry date for Microsoft support, Insight Enterprises has scare stories galore warnings for them. The software licence and box slinger reckons it has identified five “key problems” that will give sysadmins sleepless nights and …
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Monday 2nd March 2015 23:15 GMT Corborg
Yes
This so much. Never mind the blanket "you deserve it if you run windows" line. You deserve it if your server hosts so many poorly managed services that it takes this long to untangle them and upgrade. Just as you do if you have mismanaged a Linux box, and an OSX box and a car you haven't maintained, and a boiler you haven't serviced, and a kettle you haven't de-scaled and a..............
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Saturday 30th May 2015 11:23 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
The best of British
It all started after the war when British firms realised they could win without ever designing a useful fighter. Top firms could still get loans that permitted them to buy supplies abroad and refuse to finance planning and forsighted acquisitions.
I kid you not.
We got through the Falklands crisis with such Dungberk spirit. Fancy sending one airplane across the Atlantic, fortified with a couple of dozen fuel tankers just to drop one bomb on an airfield and give the entire crew PTSD?
It happened!
But at least we got rid of our Navy really usefully. You couldn't make it up, mainly because we hadn't invented computers and computer games to make it up for until then.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 10:03 GMT phuzz
What is this 'documentation' of which you speak?
Most Windows 2003 servers were probably set up about ten years ago, so the chances are, who ever set them up is not the one who's going to be upgrading them. Instead some poor PFY has to come along and try and guess if each of these weird config changes is vitally important, or just a quick fix that someone put in to fix something eight years ago and then forgot about.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 22:08 GMT P. Lee
And here's where we get back to the the smug *nix admins.
*nix doesn't generally entangle the OS and the apps like Windows does. That means an OS upgrade is far less of a problem.
"Should have used Linux" is not merely a snide, OS-fanatic-supporter statement. *nix admins are like (and probably are) perl programmers. What they do might look hard, but you'll find they are pathologically averse to work which leads them to encapsulate the drudgery in scripts - scripts which might look difficult to understand, but they are probably ok to use cross-OS versions and if alterations are required, they are probably parametrised at the start.
What could a Windows admin from 2003 do to match that sort of thing - write their own VBA GUI thing? Perhaps, but unlikely - GUIs are too complicated for that kind of function and if you have to mess with the registry...
Seriously people, loose integration with the OS is what you want. In twelve years time, would you rather upgrade an openLDAP system, or upgrade the much fancier AD system you're putting in now?
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Wednesday 4th March 2015 19:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Seriously people, loose integration with the OS is what you want. In twelve years time, would you rather upgrade an openLDAP system, or upgrade the much fancier AD system you're putting in now?"
Having managed (upgrades of) multiple openLDAP servers from debian sarge up to and including debian wheezy, with no downtime, I can wholeheartedly agree. Upgrades of linux systems, especially debian based ones which allow major version upgrades without a re-install, are a breeze.
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Wednesday 4th March 2015 10:45 GMT Tim Bates
"9-15 months average?! How ridiculous! These organizations either have too much middle management, really bad documentation or just terrible IT staff."
3-4 months for the initial planning isn't unreasonable in a business big enough to label it's "departments". You'd have specific software to contend with, scheduling around important events in different departments, etc. Managers would need to meet with other managers. Teams would need to meet to discuss the plans. It all adds up.
And that's only assuming you have a handful of servers to do - as the number of servers goes up, the time obviously does too.
A smaller business with one manager and a handful of staff could do it in a weekend, or even a quiet afternoon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
