On Thursday, February 3, 2011, 16:35:38, Jonathan Bayer wrote: > You may work in a corporate environment, but half the world is not > corporate. I include small businesses in that.
What's small business for you? We mostly deal with small businesses (3-30 computers, most under 10). > Configuration files are not written to that often, so your comment > about flushing misuscule changes is irrelevent. > I'd rather have a single conf file corrupted rather than the entire > registry corrupted. Get Process Monitor and let it capture events for 10 seconds, then filter everything but Reg* events. You'll see that there are 50-100 registry operations done every second on average. > However, I don't get your idea that conf or ini file corruption would > be an everyday occurrance. If the registry doesn't get corrupted that > often, why would individual files get corrupted any more frequently? Simple: Registry is a database, with a journal. If a write gets interrupted, Windows will almost always be able to restore it to a consistent state. Most programs that use custom config files just edit that file in place, and if that gets interrupted, it will often leave you with empty file, or a file that has half of the contents missing. > One _major_ advantage to separate conf/ini files is that it can be > much easier to migrate a software package from one system to another. And a major disadvantage is that if the program lets you run multiple copies of itself, it'll need to have some kind of config file locking implemented. > And why is it difficult to control programs from a central location > with separate files? If all the conf files are stored in a single > directory (such as /etc on Unix/Linux), I don't see any difference. > You can consider the individual files as a database, with each table > stored in a separate file, if you like. Consider this very simple scenario: you have a terminal server. Both internal users and external users work on it. You want to let internal users have unlimited internet access, but want to allow external users only access specific pages on your intranet. This is very simple to do with group policies in Windows, which control Registry. > Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fanatic about Linux vs. Windows. I use > Windows every day, even though my main job currently is a Linux > administrator. Windows is, at present, the best OS for a desktop, > although several Linux distributions are catching up. Linux, on the > other hand, is IMHO better at servers than Windows. I do recommend > Windows when it is necessary and appropriate, and recommend Linux the > same way I administer both, and while Linux certainly is sufficient for some tasks, there's a lot it's lacking when it comes to desktop use (specifically when you need to remotely administer groups of machines for desktop users). -- < Jernej Simončič ><><><><>< http://eternallybored.org/ > If it works, don't fix it. -- First Rule of Rural Mechanics ________________________________________________ Current version is 4.2.42 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
