These days there is too much nerve-racking content on Beehaw, we should post less articles and more about the life of the people here!

noctisatrae@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 55 points –

All this « editorial » content is so unnerving with so much shit happening in the world. It does not feel like a safe place if you doomscroll every time you browse it…

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I mean, I can narrate about the 20 Windows Server 2008 machines that I'm going to have to bump up to Server 2019. But, depending on how it all goes, I might just spoil the mood even more. :D

Please narrate lol! Your life is cool, maybe you can give a few anecdotes here and there :((( I don’t understand why people think they’re not interesting

Anecdote #1: Don't put yourself in a position where you've got a bunch of servers that you have to upgrade from 2008 to 2019.

Anecdote #2: The warnings against doing in-place Windows Server upgrades can't stop you if you don't read them.

What are the benefits of Windows server against super snappy Linux servers managed with docker or just an instance on a cloud provider?

In our case, there are a bunch of benefits and reasons:

  • Active Directory (plus certificate services, but I don't personally touch those at all)
  • A lot of our software here in healthcare is legacy stuff that works on Windows and only on Windows
  • My boss is used to Windows and is far too busy and old to want to learn something different
  • Windows Server is generally okay and comes with some handy management features built-in

We do have some systems that are on Linux (Photon OS for VMware stuff, a couple of vendor-implemented Ubuntu systems). We don't really have much to do with these system, though. I'm the only one here who's familiar with *nix stuff, and while I've tried implementing stuff like our Intranet server on Ubuntu Server, I eventually moved over to Windows Server with IIS because it was just easier for my coworkers to access and use.

As for containerization, we have so many servers that do one thing and only one thing. Docker would be awesome, but it's sadly just really not a thing in our slice of the healthcare and IT sector. We do plan to start moving to a hybrid cloud model with Azure, but that probably won't be for a few years.

LOL. The second one sounds awfully familiar. Not with Windows, but I’ve had my own cases where I didn’t read before breaking. How did it work out in the end?

Going okay so far. We've had a lot going on this week, so I didn't want to touch any of our critical systems for fear of adding even more shit to the plate for my coworkers. The non-critical system upgrades went smoothly. You can't upgrade from 2008 R2 straight to 2019, so I do an intermediary upgrade to 2012 first (hooray, the Windows 8 start screen!) VMware's mouse driver seems to break during the upgrade, and my RDP doesn't like connecting to 2012 servers, so I have to navigate by keyboard to the file explorer to start the upgrade from 2012 to 2019. There's probably a better way to do this, but I can't be bothered to find it.