I'm a programmer who's been using and administering Linux systems (and to a lesser extent, other Unix systems) since the mid-1990's. Now as part of my job I'm ending up doing a lot of Windows Server 2008 administration work: installing and configuring software, moving data around, identifying problems from logs, etc.
I'm finding it fairly difficult, in the sense that everything is taking me 10 times (or more) as long as it would on Linux, because I don't know where anything is. The permissions system is different, the filesystem features are different, the scheduler is different. When a service I'm configuring gives a "cannot find file" error, on Linux I've got tools like lsof
and strace
to see what processes are doing, a couple text files in /etc/
to look at, and I can figure out anything; on Windows obviously there are rough equivalents to these (Services GUI, sc
tool, etc.) but it's slow going, and often I don't even know what to google for. ("Windows version of /etc/init.d/" doesn't turn up any relevant hits!)
What resources are there for people who know Linux but not Windows? I've found many resources, including questions here on SF, for the opposite, but few or none going this direction.
I don't know exactly what I'm asking for, so anything is helpful: a Linux-to-Windows administrator's cheat sheet, a conceptual overview of Windows security/permissions/filesystems/etc., a magic decoder ring for what "Error 2" means, cmd.exe syntax for bash users, whatever. Thanks!