Zeno's Paradox
February 26, 2003 - Ergh...

I'm in the process of installing the Microsoft 2003 Server for the second time today in order to get the Greenwich beta running. It's been an ordeal and a half...

I managed to get the Greenwich server successfully installed today as a SIP proxy, but figured that for our testing purposes, a Home Server configuration might be more useful. Never-mind that the beta is packaged so shoddily that you have to go through an installation and have it fail before getting a second new installation to work. Never-mind that for this thing to work, you have to have a fresh copy of 2003 Server installed and never-mind that you have to have a local ActiveDirectory and DNS server installed also. Never-mind that the latest build that they're making available to us is over two months old. The thing that is pissing me off is that I cannot uninstall the RTC services without having to go through yet another fresh install of 2003 Server in order to get back the functionality that I had at 2:00 PM.

I went to a developers' conference last month where this was being touted to several hundred software developers as the next big thing and they should start developing software for it ASAP. Given the difficulties of installing this damn thing, I wonder how anyone outside Microsoft is developing for this at all. I guess the thing that gets to me the most is that the latest build was built on Dec. 18, 2002 at the latest, and they have not released anything else since then. I shouldn't be griping, but then again they will be releasing this in the next few months, so you would expect that they would get more recent code out to the developer community in order to find bugs and test it a bit. Isn't that the whole point of a beta program?

What ever happened to the idea of having one program that did one thing and did it well? I guess that's why I like the whole Unix philosophy -- I don't have to integrate something as simple as an instant messaging server with my kernel and have it mung up my libraries to the point of unusability. Perhaps there is hope yet...

Posted by br284 at 05:07 PM

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Have any trouble during the home server install of getting the RTC services (WinSIP, etc) to start up in the first place?

Posted by jws on March 27, 2003 02:37 PM

For the pre-Feb. build, we had plenty of problems getting them started. We managed to get it installed via the following directions:

http://metric.it.uab.edu/vnet/greenwich/rtc_install.html

This provided a "working" install that still wouldn't be able to connect and log in from Messenger.

The newest versions fix these problems and these are working.

-Chris

Posted by Chris Karr on March 27, 2003 02:43 PM
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