Posted on 04/05/2015 10:50:51 AM PDT by dayglored
Summary: Microsoft officials confirm the company will deliver the second tech preview of Windows Server 2016 in May.
It's been months -- six, in fact -- since Microsoft released a new test build of its next version of Windows Server.
Last we heard from company officials, Microsoft planned to deliver its second test build some time in the spring of 2015. That was after the Windows Server team decided to delay the release of the next version of server until 2016, and to hold off on releasing a second public test build of it at the start of 2015, as had been the original plan.
The first, and so far only, public Windows Server 2016 test build, was released October 1, 2014.
As Windows IT Pro noted earlier this week, the current expiration date for the first public preview of Windows Server 2016 is April 15. Will Microsoft beat its own expiration clock? Will it extend the expiration date?
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(Excerpt) Read more at zdnet.com ...
Keeping track of the Technical Previews of Windows Server is important to both system admins and developers. This is the best predictive and advance information available at present.
Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 30 years. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also is the cohost of the "Windows Weekly" podcast on the TWiT network.
I’ve wondered why Microsquish doesn’t name their server OS’s a couple of years out - like Server 2018 instead of Server 2016. You know, for breathing room. Is it because they know they’re already obsolete by the time they are released?
I installed Windows Server 2003 on a VM and had to call MS to activate it. The guy asked me why I would install that old a version. I replied, “Because I own it”.
Another reason (one I encounter regularly at my job): "Our QA testers have to test our products against your older OSes because that's what some of our customers are still running."
Windows Server licenses don't grow on trees, ya know... and MSDN only goes so far...
MS needs to move away from the 5 year cycle and maybe go to 10. They are not really providing much benefit for the cost.
I installed XP onto a VM for regression testing only to find that I couldn’t get the licensing to clear. Apparently the KMS license is saturated. I argued with a drone @ MS that we had retired thousands of XP boxes so there should be plenty of “water in the pool”. MS said no and I would have to purchase additional licenses - for an OS that was essentially dead.
I only need the VM for a two weeks and the license timer runs for 30 days. Guess which way I went ;’)
It's worse than that, IMO. The latest changes in Windows Server appear to me to be merely rearrangements of the GUI -- superficial, needless, and troublesome. I don't want a server OS that has a GUI based on a first-gen tablet UI, but that's Server 2012R2. We hates it we does.... OS for nassssssty hobbitses.
Frankly I'd much rather work with a commandline and/or Server 2003's UI than 2012R2, which is a shame because 2012R2 seems to be a really strong release, other than the stupid UI. So I'm really hoping that 2016 reverts back to common sense. It's a server, dammit, not a freaking handheld for 20-somethings.
Just my opinion, of course, others obviously like that stuff...
slmgr -rearm
That will give you another 30 day grace period.
You can run it 4 times, too.
See What's New in Windows Server Technical Preview
I like the new features in Hyper-V, the new Server Antimalware feature, and big additions and changes to Storage Spaces.
I run all my servers now as virtual machines. The only thing I have native on the hardware is the Hyper-V role. Facilitating failover and supportability of these virtual machines is going to be the highlight of the new server.
Thank you. I used this once on a server that I needed some extra time on when we had problems with the KMS server.
I wasn't clear, sorry about that. I didn't mean to disparage the 2016 TR, in fact I'm pretty excited about it.
[Rant]
I was disparaging 2012R2 for the fact that it looks/feels like a Fisher-Price toy because of the UI they picked for it. I don't have time in my job to be playing with themes, I have too many machines to manage, so I use the default UI by necessity. I find it annoying and it wastes my time finding things and shuffling around in a theme that looks more like Win3.11 than I care to describe. So I look forward to 2016 as a return to a server that looks and feels like a server, not a 2005 cell phone.
[End_rant]
I plan to spend some time with the MS Hypervisor -- to date I've used VMware ESX/ESXi extensively and Xen moderately, and I find them both great. I expect that Microsoft has done a good job with their virtualization.
Just FYI, 2003 support sunsets on 14 July of this year. That means no more support, extended or otherwise, and no more updates. 2003 will be as vulnerable as XP at that time. You might want to consider upgrading.
Yep, Server 2003 was basically XP-Server. That was a great build, IMO.
The only good news about remaining 2003 installations is they probably aren't used much to visit pr0n sites, so their likelihood of encountering malware isn't as great as the average XP box.
Probably, mind you... just probably... :)
You think too little of people, DG. I used S2K3 Server for a while on a gaming machine. It was the most stable platform I could find at the time.
That said, networks are constantly being scanned for vulnerable vectors. If you’re running a web server from that system, you could very easily be hacked if your firewall NATs to 80/443. My firewall logs are full of attempts against 80/443/3389 from China, Russia, Brazil, etc. They’re always watching for a way in.
The Server OSes are terrific personal machines, if you can afford the license. I used both 2K and 2K3 that way, years ago, on an MSDN while developing. I didn't intend to disparage anybody really.
> That said, networks are constantly being scanned for vulnerable vectors. If you’re running a web server from that system, you could very easily be hacked if your firewall NATs to 80/443. My firewall logs are full of attempts against 80/443/3389 from China, Russia, Brazil, etc. They’re always watching for a way in.
Yeah, I always move SSh away from 22 for the same reason. Hard to climb around in the logs when they're filled with crap.
One small place I worked, when I joined up, first thing I discovered was the firewall had a hole on 3389 to the CEO's desktop. He liked to access it from home without having to do anything special, so he'd told the previous Sysadmin to do it or get fired (the guy quit soon after). I flipped out (quietly) and set up a VPN with a passphraseless key for cert auth, and the CEO was okay with that. [shudder]
I would argue that VPN with no passphrase isn’t much better, but then, at least the end-user was happy.
I was written up for insubordination in a previous position, because I defied the manager of security’s request to configure PPTP with MS-CHAP(v1) for “legacy clients,” who he couldn’t name.
He was terminated about 6 months later after finding kiddie porn on his home computer. He was using the corporate network as a proxy. Sick people are everywhere.
You're right... I would have argued for a passphrase if the remote client were anything but his home desktop computer; I figured one copy in a fixed installation was probably only going to cause trouble if his computer was stolen from the house, and in that case I could revoke the cert more or less immediately on the server.
> I was written up for insubordination in a previous position, because I defied the manager of security’s request to configure PPTP with MS-CHAP(v1) for “legacy clients,” who he couldn’t name. He was terminated about 6 months later after finding kiddie porn on his home computer. He was using the corporate network as a proxy. Sick people are everywhere.
Good lord. That's really disturbing... both the pr0n crime, and the stupidity crime of using your own corporate network as a proxy, and trying to con another employee into participating. I suppose he didn't want to use TOR or something similarly suitable... anyway, yikes.
This was over 10 years ago before TOR was even a mainstream thing. Apparently he’d been caught doing it in the past but they didn’t know what was actually being downloaded, just that his company machine was being used to proxy it to his home computer.
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