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I know there have been several posts about Windows Vista; have any of you tried this new network OS? What are your impressions of it? Is the Aero glass interface even available with Windows Server 2008?

Terminal server gateway is hot.

Did your name seep into this About box too, somehow?

I got handed a beta version a few weeks ago, but I haven't installed it.

Mostly because in my situation there isn't much point. You don't need to install a server OS on something that isn't one, and the server I do have probably wouldn't run '08 well anyway. That and it's only a beta and I believe has an expiry date...

Topher wrote:Terminal server gateway is hot.

No, I work in Office. But before 2008 we had to do this crazy amount of work to log in remotely. Now we just have to popup a Remote Desktop client and we're in.

I could never work from home until this came out because of the nightmare to connect. Now it's just VPN+RD and I can be chained to my desk at home too! Hey wait...

On topic, I don't see a need to upgrade to 2008 yet. 2003 server does a fine job as it is. I would hope they didn't bloat a server install with that ugly interface. It's a server. (A server) Did I mention it's a SERVER? Right, I did. $10 says Topher's buddies put it in...

I have no clue, I don't work in Windows...

Looking at 2003 vs XP, 2003 does have themeing support, but is disabled by default.

You can also force disable the theme support by using services.msc.

But Toph. is correct, it's off by default in 03.

If not, your engineers/admins are smoking the man pipe.

Testiculese wrote:I could never work from home until this came out because of the nightmare to connect. Now it's just VPN+RD and I can be chained to my desk at home too! Hey wait...

VPN+VNC is very easy..

Yea I know..if the company had supported it back then. :/

Grendel wrote:

Testiculese wrote:I could never work from home until this came out because of the nightmare to connect. Now it's just VPN+RD and I can be chained to my desk at home too! Hey wait...

VPN+VNC is very easy..

I think it's too slow for remote office work. It's just usuable to remote admin a box, nothing more. Remote Desktop behaves a bit better by doing more intelligent stuff on the client side, but not by much.

Putty + sshd all the way

My VPN+RD is very fast. I can't tell the difference between working at home or working at work, other than the monitor size and I'm in my skivvies

Putty + SSHD works wonders for anything CLI-based (which is all that some of us require), but TermServ is certainly a grand improvement. Citrix helped foster the tech, M$ bought it as they buy everything else, and the rest is history.

Or is it?

Do research into NX from NoMachine.com. If you happen to have a desire to connect to a Linux or Solaris GUI, it's actually even more efficient in many ways than Citrix/TermServ, and has clients for every major OS. It spanks the pants, underwear, and socks off of VNC. It's tunnelled over ssh default port 22 by default, but if you're wanting to run ssh over a nonstandard port, it can be reconfigured easily to match the necessary port you're running sshd on.

Oh, and it's free.

The only frustration I've found is that, at least with the VPN at my work, there is no VPN client that I can get working in any OS other than Windows. So I'm stuck having a Windows box at home regardless... but I can go into Gnome or KDE full-screen and it's just like I was there... Windows XP is blissfully and completely masked ;p

heh... I thought this was deleted. I must have crossposted. o_o

Testiculese wrote:I could never work from home until this came out because of the nightmare to connect. Now it's just VPN+RD and I can be chained to my desk at home too! Hey wait...

On topic, I don't see a need to upgrade to 2008 yet. 2003 server does a fine job as it is. I would hope they didn't bloat a server install with that ugly interface. It's a server. (A server) Did I mention it's a SERVER? Right, I did. $10 says Topher's buddies put it in...

haha... yeah, there's no real need to upgrade to Vista, and there's no real need to upgrade to 2008, because neither are a significant-enough upgrade. And that's also the beta testers fault... they were the ones who were so concerned about backward compatibility. :For those of you who have used Windows Server 2008, have you experimented with Active Directory? I think the old Active Directory wouldn't let you see non-M$ computers. Is that right?

Neo wrote:I think the old Active Directory wouldn't let you see non-M$ computers. Is that right?

That's not entirely true, though in practice it sort of is. MS's LDAP implementation (Active Directory) doesn't conform to standards for POSIX account info, so it takes a lot of atribute remapping to get other LDAP clients (servers and workstations) to function properly in AD. While we haven't done that here, I know that a big selling point of the Xserves we own is that it's very easy to adapt their Open Directory installation to function within an AD environment.