Windows Server 2008; That Was Fast
April 12, 2008
In honor of the giant snow storm that we got, I actually got a snowday from work. It was pretty nice, but I had to do something awesome with it to honor the awesomeness of getting a day off from work for snow. What was I going to do? Migrate my server from Linux to Windows Server 2008 of course! I know, too predictable... Anyway, I ended up spending the day migrating all of my files off the RAID array (which would have to be demolished for Windows) and onto various devices on my network with great glee. Somewhere around 1700 I finally got done and began the delicious installation. Surprisingly, it was a pretty fast install and only took about 20 unattended minutes.
After booting up the system I was pretty impressed with the general layout. The initial configuration tasks were pretty straight forward but something was missing. Something very important for server operating systems. Network interfaces. It's a curious thing, but Windows Server 2008 failed to pick up either of my two fairly common network cards (a Broadcom and a 3com) so... uh... I really couldn't do anything with it. To put this into perspective, OSX86 was able to pick up these two cards with no trouble at all.
So, final verdict? Windows Server needs to have the ability to do networking. I know, it's not that common - but some of us like to put our servers on a network. There's about 15 incredibly common chipsets out there that you should absolutely have support for - and there's really no excuse, considering that Linux does it and is open source. Anyway, I might revisit that disk at a later date with some drivers in hand but I'm just too annoyed with the lack of network support to bother right now.
Thank you.
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3 Comments
| Tagged: Windows, OperatingSystems, Administration
Steve 2008/04/12
ahh yeah, well, you can compile you drivers for you linux machine, or have someone else reverse engineer em for ya. Im sure you can download driver for windows...
I installed win2k8 on my dell laptop and it worked, wireless and all, out of the box, with no driver debacles...
phantomdata 2008/04/12
I wish that there hadn't been any driver issues for me, heh. Network card issues are the worst because you have to jury rig another machine with Internet access, burn a cd and then transfer things that way. With the size of the base install, you'd think that they could have included support for every NIC under the sun (hell, I know that the Broadcom is supported under XP because its what this machine came with).
My point with the Linux bit was, Microsoft has no excuse for not having the drivers included since they are available source code and all on the great Intertubes. Their subsystem is totally modular and separate, so I'm sure that the GPL wouldn't infect the whole OS at that point.
OnyxRaven 2008/04/13
HA! pd made a funny.