Arik Sudman wrote: > In general, Unix management is more primitive then NT's- as it > needs fewer and simpler tools to run and also a lot of freeware is > available. However it needs higher skills to do it. NT/UNIX management > demonstrates the famous economic tradeoff LABOR VS. CAPITAL. With > CAPITAL investment in software, NT will run by less labor. I'm not sure I'd agree that Unix needs higher skills to manage, different skills certainly. More tools typically require more skills to manage, though there is no requirement to use all the tools available. NT has few tools compared to Unix. Sure you can save money (short term) by limiting your options but will it yield a good long-term return? A similar analogy can me made WRT the Macintosh. NT certainly requires more skills than a Mac to manage yet I know few admins who prefer Mac servers. The few who do generally are not familiar with operating systems other than MacOS. Also, to the best of my knowledge many decent NT administrators make salaries comparable to Unix admins. This is likely because it is difficult to get a Unix person to work with NT while the NT admins I've introduced to Unix generally prefer it more the more they use it. The bottom line really is financial (hopefully). Good people are hard to find everywhere (No thanks to our institutions of higher education. Even CM, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley push their CS majors into programming and away from systems administration and integration). Be that as it may I can show you Unix shops with 400+ servers, 2000+ users and dozens of complex applications managed by half a dozen good sysadmins. I've yet to see an NT shop that size much less a Windows environment with anywhere near that ratio of users to admins. PCs and Windows make great client desktops and Java thin clients will make better desktops as long as MS doesn't get in the way. Clients and servers are different animals however. Servers should not be built from single-user or single-user derived operating systems. Protected memory, preemptive multitasking, strong encryption, clearly delineated OS/user/application space, a range or programming languages and, most importantly: _open_systems_standards_ define good server architectures. As of 1999 there is no operating system that compares with Unix in these regards. Roger Marquis Roble Systems Consulting http://www.roble.com/ - [To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe firewalls" in the body of the message.]
