Mixing Unix and Windows

Any fair-sized enterprise has both Unix and Windows systems in it. The rise of internet protocols like HTTP has given us a basis for some level of universal interoperability, but many users need more than that.

The impending release of version 3.0 of Microsoft's Services for Unix (SFU) has me thinking about how there is more than one way to go about enhancing the interoperability of Windows and Unix systems. The irony is that while Microsoft has come up with a package to help Windows systems look like and act as peers on a Unix network, the Unix crowd has come up with Samba, which makes Unix systems play by the rules of Windows networks. Although interesting, the irony isn't all that important; each approach is useful to different sets of needs. And there are other options as well: third parties like Attachmate, Hummingbird, and others have interoperability solutions.

Interoperability means many different things. Consider Samba, which lets Unix, Linux, and Windows systems interoperate on Windows-oriented SMB networks. Microsoft's SFU 3.0, originally based on products from a company called Softway that Microsoft bought, includes an NFS server to let Windows systems share files on Unix networks, and services to synchronize passwords between Unix networks and Windows domains. SFUalso includes Windows implementations of a variety of standard Unix utilities, like cron for scheduling jobs.

I would even look at terminal-based solutions as a potentially adequate interoperability solution. Need to access Unix applications from Windows? Use an X server. Need to access Windows applications from Unix? Use Citrix MetaFrame. In fact, you can use Citrix on either end: they sell a Unix version of their Citrix MetaFrame product. Because Citrix's ICA protocol is so much more efficient than X, it may be a better solution for sharing Unix applications, especially those accessed over slower links.

But the really interesting part of SFU is how it helps to port Unix programming to Windows. It was Microsoft that provided a lot of the original funding to ActiveState, the company that implemented Perl on Windows and is now a major core contributor to Perl. The ActiveState implementationof Perl, which allows the development of cross-platform scripts, is a major success and is included in SFU 3.0, which is only a minor convenience since it's also downloadable for free from ActiveState.

Of course there are similar products to assist in the porting of Window applications to Unix. Consider Mainsoft, which sells proprietary tools and libraries. And, if you've written your applications in a system like Java or Perl that creates cross-platform code, the whole issue is less of a problem for you, although it's not as cut and dried as it's often made out to be. SFU also attempts to let you run Unix scripts (sh, ksh and csh) on Windows. Mainsoft claims a very high level of support, although there are certainly things that wont work without some additional porting work (such as referring to specific directories such as /usr/local or c:winnt).

If you're running directory services, SFU comes with another tempting feature: The ability to synchronize between NIS and Active Directory. SFU includes tools to merge the NIS database into AD, which then operates as a NIS master.

For the actual interoperability requirements of a large enterprise, it seems to me that SFU goes further than the alternatives, but obviously Samba is free. This certainly can count for a lot since SFU 3.0 is priced at $62-$99 per system, depending on your license agreement. And remember, you'll need a Windows server client license for any Unix systems that you run as clients of a Windows server.

Interoperability between Windows and Unix is a pretty mature market, but the market implications of that aren't so obvious. Does the availability of so many technologies mean that both platforms are entrenched, or does it mean that it's easier for customers to wean themselves off one platform or the other? The answer may depend on where you want to take your company.

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