Forum OpenACS Q&A: Open ACS as production on Windows 2000

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1: Open ACS as production on Windows 2000
Posted by roland dunn on 11/22/01 04:04 PM
Has anyone managed to install any versions of OpenACS on a Windows
2000 server and actually used it as a production server?

Or is still not thought to be stable enough?
Cheers Roland.

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2: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 11/22/01 07:10 PM
I don't know but I do have to wonder ... if this is a production website presumably it is of some value to someone, and since a dedicated low-end server can be put together for less than $1,000, why not just put up a box to run the site?  Most of us experience OpenACS+Postgres+Linux uptimes measured in years, in terms of non-intentional interruptions of service.  I just check to make sure my automated backup service has e-mailed me yet another success story every morning and other than that don't touch my machine.

If the site's not worth the few hundred bucks of a dedicated box is it really a "production" site?

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3: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by roland dunn on 11/23/01 03:08 PM
Hi Don,

I couldn't agree more with you. Problem is we're an agency (www.nykris.com) and sometimes you get clients who just demand that the product/service/site runs on Windows, and persuading them of the relative merits of Linux just are not an otpion.

Hence .... my trying to establish whether anyone has run a serious production website on a Windows 2000 server.

It would be SO useful is someone had. I'm very keen to here of anyones' experiences on W2K.

Roland.

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4: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by David Walker on 11/23/01 04:35 PM
I don't understand how clients get to make the technical decisions.
Why do they hire you if they do not trust your expertise?

AOLServer is discontinuing support for Win32 AOLServer.  It could
continue on in a fork (AOLServer-UH) or reappear as Cygwin AOLServer
or both.  If it is important to you should see how you can help with
one of those projects.

AOLServer on Linux, however, is not likely to lose official support
ever and if it did the community is up to the challenge of keeping
it going.

Personally I don't trust any server platform that I can't easily
eliminate all unnecessary services including the GUI.  I feel like
it adds extra points of failure.

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5: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by roland dunn on 11/23/01 09:14 PM
Clients don't always get to make techincal decisions. Some already have made technical decisions with a previous agency, looking for a new one and are unwilling to pay for new technology and shifting over existing software AS WELL as pay for the project one is pitching for.

Doesn't sound promising for AOL Server on Win32. Doesn't this kind of knock OpenACS as a viable Win32 platform on the head then?

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6: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 11/23/01 09:41 PM
The reality is 99.9% of people running WinXX don't give a &^%$ about AOLServer. The AOLServer team (correctly in my eyes) decided to not devote resources for Win. and its different way of doing things.

As for being an agency, well the hardest thing to do is say "no, I am not interested in pursuing this project", but many times that is necessary.

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7: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by Daryl Biberdorf on 11/26/01 04:58 PM
I don't understand how clients get to make the technical decisions.

Wow. I assume you're referring to "non-technical customers" here. Nonetheless, they can and do make demands like this. At my day job, I've been told by the decision making end-user at a potential customer that "a single CPU server is just a PC." This is in regards to running Oracle on a single CPU server in order to keep license costs manageable. So, they're now looking at doubling (or worse) their licensing fees for the privilege of saying their installation runs on a multi-CPU server, even though there has been no evidence that a single CPU would not be adequate.

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8: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by David Walker on 11/26/01 05:18 PM
Yea.  I'm not saying they don't get to make decisions.  I'm just complaining
about it.  In my current company we have been lucky and been able to make
the technical decisions for the sites that we host and we make every effort to
gain their trust so that they won't feel it necessary to question our decisions.

For the sites that we do not host this isn't as big an issue since we only
have to make the application stable, we don't have to keep the machine
running.

I've had difficulty with financial and marketing staff making technical
decisions at companies I've worked for previously and it isn't pretty.  (I can
still hear those poor hard drives swapping furiously on the underpowered
Windows "servers".)

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9: Response to Open ACS as production on Windows 2000 (response to 1)
Posted by Adam Farkas on 11/26/01 05:49 PM
Clients who are making technical decisions may be bull-headed and dumb, but just to play devil's advocate for a second...

They may be considering TCO when looking at the different technical choices. One of the major concerns of any corporation will be the question: "who will fix this when you [contractor] are gone?"

The community of people who understand openacs/aolserver (or even "popular" technologies like Linux) is much smaller than the world of people who understand windows, etc.

So they may be making your life a living hell out of fear that if they go with something off-beat, finding someone to service the system will be difficult and expensive.

It's probably up to you to convince them otherwise, in terms that they can understand. Not easy.