Linking Unix and Windows 2000, the Microsoft way
Brien M Posey
Published: 24 Dec 2002 23:21 GMT
Administrative GUI and command line toolset
Windows Services for Unix allows administration via the command line or through a GUI interface. If you prefer to take the command prompt approach, you'll be happy to know that, although the Unix shell is designed primarily to use Unix commands, you can actually run Windows applications from the Unix shell on Windows machines. This works because the Unix shell is built on top of the WIN32 subsystem.
The GUI management interface is based on the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). The Windows Services for Unix Administration tool, shown in Figure A, allows administrators to manage all of the major components through a single tool.
| Figure A |
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| The Windows Services for Unix Administration tool allows administrators to manage all of the major components through a single tool. |
Performance enhancements
One of the problems with previous versions of Windows Services for Unix is that many performance adjustments required a system reboot. Microsoft has finally realised that this just isn't acceptable in a work environment and has made the performance settings more dynamic. For example, when you modify a performance-related registry key in the latest version of Windows Services for Unix, the program instantly recognises and applies the change.
The NFS service has also been rewritten for greater performance. Perhaps the most notable difference is that NFS now supports directory caching. So when clients need to browse the directory, they can read the directory contents from the server's memory rather than from the hard disk. You can even use the Windows Services for Unix Administration tool to specify how much memory you want to reserve for directory caching. The default setting is 128 KB.
Still another enhancement is the way that Windows Services for Unix handles case sensitivity. By default, Windows Services for Unix is configured to preserve case sensitivity. This boosts file performance considerably, since no case translation is needed. However, you have the option to translate filenames into upper or lower case, should you wish to. Furthermore, case translation is set individually for the NTFS, FAT, and CDFS file systems. You can see the screen that controls many of the NFS performance enhancements in Figure B.
| Figure B |
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| The NFS server component has been rewritten with several performance enhancements. |
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