RE: Windows 2000 Cluster on oracle

Stephen - I appreciate your comments. One of the hard things for me to understand is that if you're going to be working on W2K, better plan on being the administrator. At Unix sites we tend to have DBAs supported by sys admins. Some shops may indeed treat W2K that way. But usually if you are always asking the NT administrator to do tasks that the sys admins always insisted they do on Unix, you end up being viewed as some sort of novice or old crank that isn't self-sufficient like everyone else.

   At our company, to get around some issues of developers just messing around with production W2K servers like it was their own PC, we are looking to the ITIL standards and creating a staging server between test and production. This will be a mirror of production. Software and installation instructions will be provided by developers. A test install will be performed on staging, and some tests performed. If everything is okay, then it will be scheduled for a production install. If problems are encountered, it will be bounced back to the developers to get their act together. Has anyone tried this? Overkill/impractical?

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 4:42 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

> -----Original Message-----
>
> As much as I hate defending Windoze, Win2k is in fact rather stable,
> at least Win2k server is. I have one system on Win2k that I reboot,
> oh, every 6 months or so.
>
> Death to NT though.
>

The biggest problem that I have seen is (to me anyway) not one of stability (I'll leave that to the bare-metal boys to argue about) but that it is not really multi-user. I think it only supports two users.

1. You're an administrator and can do anything you want.
2. You're not an administrator and can't do squat.

The idea of an application owner, somewhere in between -- someone who needs to stop and start the app; install patches and upgrades to the app; but only have access to his/her stuff and nobody else's stuff -- doesn't seem to be well supported. So the person who has a web app on the same box as your database has complete access (or can take it) to any of your stuff.

Then there is the issue of all the missing Unix scripting utilities ... which I suppose you can install ... if you are *THE* administrator and not just *AN* administrator ... because we sure don't want *AN* administrator pissing off *THE* administrator ... which the Oracle DBA in a company of any size probably is not. And you have to listen to *THE* administrators constantly whine about the Oracle DBA being *AN* administrator, and "accidentally" revoking the DBA's admin privileges from time to time.

Then there is the issue of doing all your admin stuff on a 28K dial-up line after hours; NOT where you want to use a GUI! But *THE* administrators have only made provision for their easy dial-up access; and screw anyone who might only be *AN* administrator.

> Windows is cheaper than SUN. Linux is cheaper than Windows.

Try comparing prices for a large Dell Xeon box versus a Sun V880 box. The bigger you get, the more competitive the mainline Unix boys get.

-

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