I've run AOL on NT, Linux and Solaris. I've run NT 4 since it existed and Unix for about 20 years. I've found AOL to be more stable on Unix than NT, but NT is stable enough to run in production if you run monitoring software ( and you should on Unix also ). I've standardized on Sun Netra X1. They are small, light, rackmountable, don't use much power and cost $995. I don't have any numbers ( except for the acs dev support stuff ) but they seem much faster than the NT boxes also. The Sun is a single 500 and NT was dual 733, but the Sun returns pages twice (yes twice) as fast.
I've encounted 3 differences between the Unix and NT platform. 1. Newlines mostly work but sometimes on mulitline queries I get Oracle errors when I move the code. 2. ACS templates seem to have a different root directory 3. I've has issues with binary data on NT In spite of these minor problems it's totally practical to develope on NT and deploy on Unix As far as building AOL I've managed to do it on NT, but it took me about a week to get everthing to work, but I'm definatly not a Visual Studio expert. On Solaris the problems are different. You'll spend a day tracking down and installing all the dev tools. After that you really can just type make. In theory you could run Solaris on Intel or Linux on Sparc but I would not recommend it. The bottom line is if you can't run Unix, AOLserver works just fine. If you can it works better. Barry Books
