Microsoft grants ‘interoperability’ wish

7 September 2004

LAST year, K. Swaminathan, an analyst and programmer at Pentasoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd, was disappointed when Microsoft Corp did not discuss its Services For Unix set of tools at its TechEd 2003 developers conference.

He had said then that he hoped to learn more about the interoperability and interportability between Microsoft’s products and open source technologies.

This year, the software giant has granted Swaminathan’s wishes and has lined up a session on Microsoft Services For Unix 3.5 (SFU 3.5) at TechEd 2004, to be held from Sept 13-17 at Palace of the Golden Horses in Seri Kembangan.

SFU 3.5 is a downloadable subsystem that runs on top of the Windows operating system, allowing developers to compile and natively run Unix programs and scripts.

As with the previous version, SFU 3.5 will also include the Interix subsystem which comes with a full set of Unix utilities and shells, support for a single-rooted file system and a software development kit (SDK) for porting applications.

According to Jason Zions, a software architect at Microsoft, the US software giant acquired Interix technology from Softway Systems Inc in 1999, the same year SFU was first introduced to enable Windows and Unix networks to coexist.

Prior to version 3.0, the company bundled a KornShell environment that had its limitations. It did not have a full set of tools as defined by the Posix (Portable Operating System Interface) standard and could not build or run customer-built Unix applications.

Finetuning performance
The Interix subsystem, the company said, has been tuned to offer about 30% improvement in combined fork and exec performance, 75% improvement in pipe bandwidth and over 150% improvement in fstat latency.

“Unix applications built using SFU 3.5 see a file I/O performance several times faster than with SFU 3.0,” Zions claimed.

This represents an improvement of over 100% and places file I/O performance within 10% of the Win32 subsystem, Microsoft said.

Interix also gives developers all the familiar programming and scripting languages commonly found in the Unix world, the Korn and C shells, and also support for Perl, fortran77 as well as the C and C++ programming languages.

SFU 3.5 itself also comes with several other significant enhancements built in, which include, among others, an improved model for mapping permissions between Windows and Unix machines as well as support for setuid and setgid in its NFS server.

The NFS server also comes with support for Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service as well as simplified and enhanced authentication in Windows Server 2003 Active Directory environments.

Microsoft said that the NFS server is now “cluster-aware” and shows performance gains of about 50% over version 2.0 on comparable hardware.

“When run on Windows Server 2003, Services For Unix 3.5 provides twice the NFS Server throughput as SFU 3.0,” Zions said.

The Network Information System (NIS) server can how handle up to 64,000 users, while data migration times are now roughly 40% of what they were with SFU 3.0.

The built-in Telnet server and client software in SFU 3.5 now support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) as well as additional international character sets.

Coexistence, cohabitation
In addition, Microsoft has addressed a number of security issues, including zone-checking, before issuing NTLM credentials to prevent the use of NTLM outside the trusted zone.

“This architectural approach to hosting both environments (Windows with SFU running as a subsystem) allows applications to be constructed using Unix and Windows software components,” Zions said.

“New components can be built more easily using tools like Visual Studio, and the Microsoft enterprise software platform can be used to solve business problems without throwing away legacy Unix code.

“Staff with Unix development and administrative skills can continue to apply that knowledge even on Windows systems, while developers can use SFU, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework to expose legacy Unix-based applications as web services.

“This increases the lifespan of these applications and minimises the risks inherent in extending or evolving any software to provide new features or integrate into a more modern enterprise IT architecture,” he added.

For more information and TechEd 2004 registration details, call (03) 7494-0272, e-mail teched2004@roots.com.my, or point your browser to star-techcentral.com/teched or www.teched.com.my.

TechEd is an annual conference targeted at technopreneurs, IT administrators, software developers, software architects and others in similar fields.

There will be over 40 companies, local and multinational, exhibiting their latest technologies and solutions, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, AMD, Trend Micro and APC.

In.Tech is the official publication for this year’s event, which is themed Attain the Edge and is in its fifth year running in Malaysia.