On 03/05/2005 12:12:56 PM, Rob Miracle wrote:
On MY LAPTOP, I can watch it pump the wireless card AFTER login. I watch it use DHCP to get its address. That card is not live until after boot. On my linux box, it DHCP's before the login. If your wired and sharing resources, sure, that happens before the login prompt. But I never said that. I also said it doesn't attempt to mount network drives until after login. It can't. Windows networking requires knowing who you are because you have to login into the remote host. It can't do that until it knows who you are. Windows can make its shared resources avaialble before login because it doesn't matter who is going to logon but it will not attempt to map your network drives until you login.
Completly wrong?
That was my experience with PPPoE because it required user authentication. I could find no way to get it to dial the PPPoE before I logged in. After a lot of searching, I did find a script that would do that - dial your PPPoE and authenticate as a system service - but the guy wanted money for it. I wish I knew more about Windows services because I didn't want to pay for what (at least should be) is something trivial (I assume it's just a batch file or something) - but I rarely use Windows, so I have no motive to learn how to do that stuff.
With respect to Windows being rock solid - it is, XP has never crashed on me that wasn't a hardware failure that would have taken down any OS (well, any OS on hardware without redundancy) - though unfortunately I bought XP Home figuring I didn't need the server crap, but apparently XP Pro makes life a lot easier - like taking ownership and stuff like that.
Also - Linux doesn't have a heart attack if you change the motherboard chipset completely. Kudzu just adapts - and often succesfully migrates network settings etc. (though, and no fault of kudzu here, it doesn't get the interfaces in the order you want them - so when I swap a mobo in Linux, I let kudzu do its thing and THEN attach the network cables)
Linux really is just far more advanced than Windows with stuff like that. Admittedly, though - that is a geek thing to do (replace a motherboard), most consumers just buy a new PC when old board (or cpu) dies. Or pay to have it swapped out.
-- Michael A. Peters http://mpeters.us/
