The last month or so, I've been watching a lot of clabretro's videos. If you find this sort of thing interesting (old enterprise software, and possibly the old servers/equipment that would run that software), you'll definitely like his channel! His retrorack is more from the early 2000s rather than the late 2000s, but there's probably still a good amount of cross over between what you're both doing.

https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro

I'm really pleased he's embraced long form videos showing the steps (and the failures) along the way, in the early videos you can hear he's apprehensive about if people would find it interesting in a world of short form content.

He also has really great editing where he'll sometimes show the success of a step first if it's a long journey to keep interest and then go back through the details so you can tell he's put care into the production.

I also enjoy his humourous Paul Thurrott-like jabs at himself and the problems he hits too, it feels like he has a nice humility about himself.

It kills me that it never occurred to me there would be a market for videos of re-living the work I did from 1997 on. I could have made a ton of 'content' about that.

My videos would consist mostly of: “Chris is cursing msbuild again.” “Chris is losing a table tennis game to Mike again while he waits for the build to complete.” And so forth.

Right? When I saw the list of Server 2008 things it's like... (a) please no I don't want to see that again and (b) you do know that Server 2025 is basically the same, right?

That's actually the entire point of this specific endeavor. Windows server hasn't really changed that much, and professionally I deal with tons of small businesses remediating these sorts of legacy systems.

So in a sense I'm just setting the old systems up to have a better understanding when I engage to tear them down.

clabretro does it all on hardmode too. Picks the most obscure, esoteric shit to try and get working: IBM i was the most recent, but his AT&T Merlin Phone series was great. I feel like the Sun Ray stuff was the most likely to be you know, actually documented in a way meant for mere mortals to read, and still likely to be hosted somewhere accessible.

The IBM i stuff, my god, the acronyms, the terse and unhelpful menus and error messages, the insane lengths to get a simple goddamn serial console, it's no wonder IBM gets paid to handle it all for you.

I used to look after a System /36. It came with around 10 feet (thick) of manuals.

I kept a long plastic straw inside the case - the size of a chest freezer - to tickle one of the fans into life. If you forgot that step, the IPL (boot) would take around 45 mins and then about 20 minutes later ... thermal shutdown!

Got out of the game in 2013, this is cool. The days of people accessing things they shouldn't and (the pretty simple method of) hunting them down. All pretty trivial stuff, but when I see the tools available these days, it's mind boggling but not surprising.

Vista got a lot of hate when it came out but honestly, I liked it then and I continue to not think of it as problematic. It introduced `gksudo` to everyone and people complained about it but I was an Ubuntu user prior to using Vista so it felt natural to me. Overall, it was an operating system that worked well, as did Windows 7 afterwards with signed drivers and so on. In fact, those Windows versions got the reloadable graphics drivers at the time which I much envied since it was not so easy to get graphics restarted on Linux if it froze.

I had my Dell XPS M1330 set to dual boot into Vista. Power button would take me straight to windows. And the alternative bootloader Media button would take me straight to Ubuntu. Fun little setup. No need to grub chainload.

Imo vistas biggest problem was they underspecced the minimum system requirements. Most peoples experience with vista was on sub 1gb of ram machines with a single core, no gpu and 32 bits. Vista was an os for modern architectures first. Windows 7 had the luxury of those features being the default at launch.

Theres a bit more to that story, leading up to Vista Intel's iGPUs lacked proper DX 9 support, just partial. Particularly 910/915 were marketed as "Vista Capable" but not "Vista Premium Ready".

And the later ones which did have full DX 9 support really weren't that much better. I recall drivers being an absolute mess for a lot of external peripherals too, many that weren't even dated took ages to get something usable for vista if at all.

Same. I think the UX changes plus the 32/64 bit issues led it to have a rocky start.

IMO, Vista crawled so Win7 could run. Same with Win 2000 and WinXP.

I meant from a consumer usage and uptake perspective. I was lucky to use Win 2000 as a consumer as my dad was a SWE who got free licenses from work (along with Compaq workstations, ergonomic chairs, and tickets to ATT Park), but apparently Win2000 for consumer usage was much less common than I thought.

Vista helped a lot of people switch to Mac, first to run windows XP on it, then slowly switch to Mac more permanently.

Just a heads up, There was a lot of problems running RSAT (Remote Admin GUI Tools) on Vista when interacting with 2008 R2. Windows 7 quickly became required for 2008 R2. (Windows 7 is client OS of 2008 R2)

Otherwise, rock on.

An excellent point, I'm not opposed to using Windows 7 to work around those problems, or make the lab more homogeneous.

I just want an excuse to use my Vista netbook for a couple of months, even if it's going to cause me problems!

Just letting you know. You could also install one of Windows 2008 R2 servers in GUI mode and use RSAT tools on that to manage the others. Knew plenty of admins who did that.

None of the Windows side of that is tremendously far-removed from today.

Syteline... Progress... Ugh. I'm having trouble overcoming the violent undulations of my spleen. So many memories of performance issues, "dump and reload" of databases, and Progress clustering issues (though that was with QAD ERP and not Symix/Syteline).

That was precisely my thinking behind doing this. I don't get to deploy server core particularly often so building a lab around using it specifically felt cool, but all of the processes/methodologies around deploying those systems carries forward well enough.

Your Syteline experience mirrors mine haha, but since it's a lab I'm hoping I won't run into too many errors.

I have one Linux -> Windows migration story that went really well. Early-2000s, I worked for a company that printed massive amounts of data and shipped it to clients. The data had to be printed and shipped, digital delivery wasn't an option at the time (legal BS). The Unix/Linux sysadmins were using a Linux box as a print server, having trouble getting a newly purchased, super expensive printer to print correctly. They worked on this "project" for weeks. The printer manufacturer didn't have a Linux driver and wasn't going to make one, so the internal team was trying to write their own. Finally, I told them to just use Windows as the print server; the Windows drivers are right there on the company website. The idea received relentless pushback: Windows can't handle the load. Our automation uses Unix-only protocols (ftp) to copy the data to the print server. Windows is too expensive. Finally, I took an old desktop PC, installed Windows 2000, added all the required printers, including the new, expensive printer. Installed all the manufacturers' drivers. Then I installed ftp, added the matching auth credentials, and it was done. The whole process took me, maybe, 2 hours. Naturally the sysadmins that owned this process were pissed; they hated it. But their boss loved it and it became the solution. Linux -> Windows FTW.

Microsoft's recent track record with Windows 11 seems to have kickstarted another Win -> Linux migration wave.

good question. let me dig in my memory.

the first computer i got to use was a TRS-80 III i believe in highschool. this thing was already old at the time which was the late 90s, but it did the job. we had a full classroom of them, one of which was acting as a server with two floppy disks, and all the others were booting off the server, freeing the floppy drive for our data. we learned BASIC on it, so i guess that is all that was running on there.

the school also had a 286 i believe, (i am guessing by what models were common in the late 80s) in the library running Novell Netware that i was allowed to use. i distinctly remember wondering if that was unix, trying some unix commands that i had read about. i was able to use turbo pascal on it and a few other programs.

the science teacher had an Apple II i think that i was also allowed to play with occasionally. i remember pranking the teacher with a function that would turn the desktop upside down. and at home we had a PC or compatible. most likely a Tandy 1000 from RadioShack. i remember that the family bought some software for it. was it DeskMate? i don't recognize the screenshots that i can find online now. i do remember using word perfect and connecting to BBS systems with a modem, downloading software that i would try out and play around with.

oh, before all that i did a 3 week internship at a machine design company where i got to use autocad on a PC on whatever that was running on. probably DOS as well.

i had friends with ataris or amigas. but i never got a chance to actually use them, the friends were just showing them to me.

one more interesting detail from that time. at one point we visited friends who had an amiga i believe with a floppy drive that could write 10MB on a 3.5" floppy. i could not find a reference to that on wikipedia, so i don't know what that was. but i am pretty confident that i remember the 10MB capacity correctly.

when i entered university in the early 90s i got my first computer that was actually my own. it came with DOS obviously, while we were using unix at the uni (SunOS/Solaris/AIX (also one class where we got access to VMS)) and when i discovered linux, i made it dual boot, and i remember every time i reinstalled linux to upgrade it, i shrank the DOS partition until finally it was gone completely.

around the same time when i visited my grandparents, grandma, who was volunteering as a secretary for some NGOs wished for a computer. grandpa sent me out to get one, and i picked OS/2 to run on it. i believe i installed emacs for her to use, and LaTeX which i had learned about at uni. when i came back a year later, someone helped her by installing windows on it. could not have that. then i decided to change universities and study in my grandparents home town, so moved in with them, of course bringing my linux computer. grandma was intrigued and wanted to learn linux too. again, emacs and LaTeX set up for her and the G.R.E.A.T desktop system.

wow, long answer. i got a but carried away, sorry. i hope it is interesting.

My only netware experience was with pxeboot (or similar) of a dos/win3.11 environment over ipx, but that was 93 onwards.

> someone helped her by installing windows on it

"helped"

Personally I hadn't tried Linux until after windows 95, and a command line only environment wasn't great. It wasn't until redhat 6 came out that my VGA card (SiS 6326) was properly supported (more than 640x480 with a broken cursor)

By the time I went to university in 2000 there were a handful of CDE powered workstations running some form of unix in one of the labs (the blue lab), but the majority of unix style machines were Linux.

When I started work as a trainee in 2003 they'd just bought a new Solaris setup with an oracle RAC to run a jboss middleware app. The last Solaris box we bought were some T2000s and a pair of X4500s, bought just before I took over in 2006. By 2008 everything was running on linux.

Scares me to think that 2008 was neared to Linux launching than it is today. Its probably about the last time I actually compiled a kernel - certainly via make menuconfig - too.

well actually, to be honest for me too. i had actually read about unix before i could get access to a computer, and the first o'reilly book i bought was titled "DOS meets Unix" in 1988, long before i had my own computer.

It doesn’t feel that 2009 is all that far away but… 17 years ago. I remember a lot of forums during 09” in fringe commodore groups and amiga. And they still go on.

But yes 2009 was a different time, to be a sysadmin all you had to effectively know was how to reinstall an OS and drivers and you were golden.

> But yes 2009 was a different time, to be a sysadmin all you had to effectively know was how to reinstall an OS and drivers and you were golden.

I got a lot of good business from helping small businesses recover from "sysadmins" who only knew how to reinstall the OS and drivers. I owe a lot to them. (So many bad Active Directory environments... So many ill-conceived attempts at using Group Policy, network segmentation, lack of understanding 802.1x, etc...)

Exactly, but at the same time many small businesses also followed cheapest vendor first which is how they got into those situations in the first place.

It was a great time, I learned my initial skils then, and I just wish I was more business minded or relocated to Seattle or California, would be much more ahead in my career and financial ladder.

2009 was right at the cusp of "cattle not pets" mindset, and many ways a transitional time from physical servers to virtual servers to disposable single-app VMs.

Once in my career I had to work with Sun/Spark machines :D very bad practice, doesn't like to move from current modern tools back to the wild terminals experience, for the windows it's even worst

>Configuring random Mikrotik devices as wlan to lan bridges

Sometimes it just works. Sometimes it causes crazy issues. Depends on the wifi chip is my understanding.