When you do something wrong with fdisk you can say goodbye to your partition table!
that's what happened to me, but things were made worse by the nasty XFS resize tool which required a mounted partition to work...
anyway i don't want to talk about this little error of mine, but of what came after! I decided to put back Windows on, since there were too many incompatibilities and I wanted to try the Windows Server 2003 downloaded from the MSDNAA.
the installation was just like Windows XP, but only in this occasion i noticed that formatting 80GB with NTFS disk takes 40 minutes, with Reiserfs (or any other linux fs) takes less then 10 seconds...
So, like any other Windows, the first thing to do after a fresh install is to go to windowsupdate.com! I didn't set up a firewall because i tought that a server *might* already have some kind of protection from external threats! yet again, i overesteemated Windows...
In fact while I was trying to set up the graphic card in safe mode the nasty worm of "You have 60 seconds before reboot" show up! And since updates or virus scan weren't working any more i just had to rewind everything!
Yeah, after the usual 40 minutes of formatting and after installing i was prompted with a nice welcome, the ctrl+alt+del for entering! I set up the firewall right away and when I rebooted i was prompted with an even nicer welcome, a blue screen of death! Every time i tried to log in the system crashed and it was all firewall fault, in fact when i had uninstalled it the system went fine again...
Not only the firewall was driving me nuts (instead of Zone Alarm i put PCtool Firewall), but the antivirus as well was nagging at me!!!
I tried the main ones, Free-Av, AVGfree and Avast: AVG said its licence didn't allow installation on a server (are you crazy??? why???), Free-Av said it couldn't install on corporate business machine (I'm not a business, I'm a single person), and Avast simply refused to launch because i was in Windows NT (pure maddness, Windows XP is NT as well)
Lucky was that i found a GNU/GPL antivirus, ClamWin, that allowed installation anywhere, anytime! All hail to opensource!
Would you think that's all? Not at all! The best of all, the ATI graphics card!
Linux users know that Ati is not quite good at drivers for linux, but they would cheer up saying "at least windows drivers are fine" - WRONG!
There is NO driver for the ATI Mobility (chip R200) on Windows Server 2003! The official one would just screw the screen and force to continuosly reboot, the unofficial ones, like DNA or Omega drivers went just crazy (the former refusing to install and the latter setting up strange screen resoultions)
It all ended by cleaning everything up and putting up Windows XP yet again!
You know, i wasn't sure if I was dealing with a Windows or a Linux as they both had the same drivers issue with everything! That proves that it's not the operating system you use, but how well it's supported by third parties! So Windows XP has very good support, while Windows Server 2003 hasn't! So we could say Windows Server 2003 is the same of Linux... just a hundred times less stable :-)
ok we couln't :-D
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
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Huh. Poor QA tester... :-) I've got 3 points to discuss.
ReplyDelete#1. NTFS formatting. You've chosen full formatting which really takes a lot of time. Quick format takes a couple of seconds.
#2. Firewall. Well, just installed Windows is welcome for attacks, it's a known fact. :-) I use Agnitum Outpost Security Suite, it supports WinXP and WS2003 (both 32- and 64-bit). It includes firewall, antivirus engine, anti-spyware, anti-banner, anti-spam plugins. Good all-in-one suite.
#3. Graphic drivers. Any 3D card support is disabled by default in WS2003. You have to enable hardware acceleration in graphic card options. May be it will help.
thanks for your comment timur!
ReplyDeleteI didn't know about the graphics abilitation stuff in WS2003! if I ever have to install WS2003 again, I'll keep that in mind ;)