Resolve to Drop NT

Given that NT dropped off the development roadmap and support officially ended on Christmas Eve, it amazes me to see people are still using it on production systems. For example, I hit Netcraft to check the website for a major utility company, and they (or at least their hosting company) upgraded from NT 4 to Win2K3 no more than two months ago.

Why do I say it “amazes” me? I seem to remember an RPC vulnerability that Microsoft announced they would not be patching because it would require a heavy rewrite of a chunk of NT’s code. I assume we have the Windows monolithic kernel to thank for this. I had zero budget to upgrade my five NT machines to Win2K at the time the vulnerability was announced, and I found Microsoft’s “firewall it & pray” advice unacceptable. That became the moment I got serious about replacing them with Linux servers.

And why not? Even speaking as a partial Windows admin, Win2K and 2K3 offer quite a bit more than NT ever did, and there’s not much on NT that can’t be replaced by Linux. DHCP, web, file & print sharing… all covered. My evaluation server running Red Hat 7.3 already handled web-based email for students, so it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to roll Linux out to the rest of the school one summer. And obviously budget’s not an issue but for the companies who would purchase service contracts from vendors like Novell or Red Hat.

Which then begs the question “Why keep it?” The only reason I can think of is it’s a “proven system” according to some, and those are exactly what the utility company I mentioned keeps around. They can’t afford to play with new stuff in their mission-critical applications and find themselves involuntary beta testers; it could be very damaging, possibly even deadly. Yet if that is indeed the case, then why keep a system with a known, unpatchable vulnerability around?

I definitely agree with the assessments flying around the Open Source camp that this is a great opportunity to get Linux into more installations, but whichever direction you choose to go, please, move away from NT.

(On a completely unrelated note, Wild at Heart is on as I type this. Wow, what a straaaange flick.)