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	This story was printed from dtheatre.com,
	located at http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=388.
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Reasons why NT sucks
By SKillBot, (DT)
December 11, 1999 7:39 PM PT

You've seen the Microsoft ads.?You're sick of those controversial mindcraft tests on NT vs.?Linux that will never get buried.?Maybe you swear by Linux, and maybe NT does what you want it to do.?I had the extreme fortune (heavy sarcasm) of setting up an NT box over the last 24 hours, and I post my reasons why NT could come free with a $20 bill inside and still be less valuable than a debian CD.?Read more...

Bascially, I was given a pretty nice rack mount PII 233 w/ 256M of RAM and asked to put NT on it and make it a pretty basic web server. Easy enough.

For some reason, I couldn't get it to boot off the scsi cdrom. Maybe I'm just a dumbass. So, I made the three boot disks, and got it to the point of requiring the CD. It wouldn't recognize the CD for the life of itself. After [the first time] I got NT running, it could read the CD just fine though. To get around that, I had to put an IDE cdrom in it, which was really more convenient (for reasons you'll see later), because I could boot off it.

I think I have the first build without service packs or anything. No problem, I grabbed SP5 from microsoft's web site and went about installing it. Mind you, you can't browse MS's web site with THEIR OWN BROWSER. It gives this error:

Unable to open http://www.microsoft.com/. You do not have permission to open this item. Directory Listing Denied This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

I am, however, pleased to announce that dtheatre doesn't look too bad from IE2. So anyways, SP5 installed without a hitch. But it only upgrades from IIS 2.0 to IIS 3.0. This will not do. I avoided SP6a because I read some bad things about it (mostly about SP6). So I started downloading the options pack with IIS 4.0 to my computer. I went home, slept, came back, turned the machine on, and read a happy error message: couldn't find NTLDR

According to the all-knowing Internet, this happens when the NTLDR file is absent or corrupted. Nothing unusual made this happen, it just did it by itself. I had this problem a couple times before the service pack, so it wasn't that. If you boot with the CD and reapir an NT installation, this problem will go away. But I was careful not to replace anything other than the NTLDR file, lest the service pack implode and rip my hand off.

Now, onto the installation of the options pack. Nope. It requires SP3 and IE 4.01. Afraid that removing a service pack will not help the stability of it, I just reinstalled the whole thing and put SP3 on. I'm downloading IE5 right now from one of the slowest servers on the internet, so I hope that works. I put apache on as a service, and it works really well. So if this doesn't work, I'll just go with that and let all else be damned.

Other fun things about NT4:

You can't create a reapir disk with your NT setup disk, it actually checks for that.
If you try to browse the network neighborhood too soon, it will say: unable to browse the network, the requested device is in use. (The network??? Guess I just have to wait until no one's using the network :)
When making partitions, you can make a really big one (like 4gigs) and try to put ntfs on it. But it won't work. You can put fat16 on it though, which you can't do with win9x or dos.
You can't change the display adapter during setup, although it brings up the settings dialog without you asking for it.

In summary, I think these things are WAY less intuitive than a UNIX like system, and there are fewer internet resources for this. Most of them are found in books or cd's. And they're really expensive. There's a whole microsoft course on installing IIS 4. If the error messages made sense, if things worked the way they should, and if it didn't mysteriously screw itself up at random, I would think NT might be a decent product for some folks. But until that changes, I'll keep my position on it. It's a complete waste of time and system resources. FreeBSD or Redhat are way easier to get started and to maintain. And they're both FREE.

As a side note, my experiences with working installations of Win2K have been somewhat enjoyable. I couldn't even get the installation kernel to boot on my machine though. Also, the NT apache installation was great. It didn't require a specific version of the service packs, a big, bloated web browser, or anything. I did have to edit the configuration file and specify a server name to get it to run, and I had to install it as a service manually (as opposed to clicking on the icon it installs). But it was quick and painless other than that.