[Cloudane]

I was playing around with Gamevoice today, after installing WinXP on our home networking server. I hadn't realised Winroute wasn't compatible with XP yet, and ended up using the built-in ICS.
Lo and behold it worked! Multiple people behind the ICS were able to join one peer-hosted Gamevoice session, something that never worked on Winroute or Linux.

What surprised me the most, was that Gamevoice automatically communicated with the server and set up the port forwarding dynamically! It's a fantastic idea, and hope this kind of thing becomes a standard (the ability for apps to organise their own port forwarding) as more and more people have to use NATs nowadays. Some programs can require quite tricky port forwarding to work, but if they all organised it themselves it'd mean a lot less hassle.
Of course, trojans could have a lot of fun with that. Which is why it ought to be an *optional* feature.

Yet people flame me for using a Windows-based system as a router, saying I should be using Linux. I daren't admit that I use Windows for it normally.
Why? When ICS is so easy to set up, can be controlled remotely from the system tray, works seamlessly with Netmeeting and Gamevoice, and port forwarding can be set up by my parents (who'd never understand ipmasqadm -A -v -u -r blahblahblah)... why would I want to go back to something that seems so primitive?

I'm not trolling here, and I'm not stupid either I know Windows can be a lot less secure, but I never see a problem providing you keep up with the updates. I know ICS is slightly lacking in features, but apart from Gamevoice, Winroute is the answer to that.
It's an honest question. Why do I get flamed for using Windows on the server? Why should I switch to something less intuitive, when this already does the job so well? Even though it's free. I like the idea of open-source, but... not enough to give up all these features.
It's an honest question.. I'm interested. Consider it a feasibility study.

I remind you that this is a home network with parents who are avid online gaming fans... which is why I've never been totally paranoid about security
Again, this is not meant to be a troll. Let's hear some honest answers to an honest question.

[Cloudane]

Wow...
Thanks, that was the most detailed and mature comment I've seen on the subject so far
I can see this is a board with quite some intelligence.

I like Linux as well (I should say GNU/Linux but that's another story), and certainly don't want to bash it. But I definitely say it's not the 100% perfect system that some people claim. And I don't believe Microsoft is evil or anything.
Currently, Linux stays on my secondary desktop PC for things like Perl and general messing around. It replaced Windows during the "Millennium" era on my main box, when Windows was more unstable than ever before. But now we've got a stable "home" version of Windows (XP) I ended up using that, for the sake of getting things done faster.
As much as I love the flexibility of Linux apps, it's sometimes much preferable to be able to run a quick "Installshield" to install new software than to spend a couple of hours digging out RPM dependencies or compiling. My biggest peeve with it so far.

As for this server... I basically like using the best tool for the job at hand, and in this case Windows won that by far. Nice to be reassured it isn't necessarily the "wrong" way of doing it
It's a shame some of the more rabid GPL fanatics can't see it that way. But some are pretty extremist... they insist that anything Microsoft is the work of the devil and should be avoided at all costs.

I guess the point is, they aren't going to win many more users by insulting them and trying to shame them into converting - that's not good. Good job they're not *all* like that

[Cloudane]

Very true. If only KDE and GNOME would join forces for instance, they'd have a kickass GUI.

Instead, we have two "reasonable" GUIs that are always 2 years behind the rest of the world.

They fight over possible standards too - nobody should have to start up a command prompt to run a program; said programs should put themselves in the start/launch/whatever menu. But with two different 'mainstream' window managers... neither of which can agree on a menu format, and many more less popular ones to choose from... how can they?
Some people say "well why not add them to the menu by hand if it bothers you that much". I don't accept that. Okay it's not a huge amount of effort, but it mounts up... when you have 100 things that need to be done like this, it gets inefficient.

Again, Linux is a Good Thing ™ in general. But it's extremely messy on the desktop. Of course, the subject is really about a case where Windows actually worked far better as a server. I accept that in most cases, Linux makes a much more efficient server to maintain, and can be extremely secure in the right hands (actually I prefer BSD for most server situations, but that's yet another story). But it always seems to be a couple of years behind, and when something like this comes up, it's not supported yet.
It also suffers from the fact that it's written by geeks for geeks. "Scratch an itch" programming, I believe they call it. That's why it took ages to get a Netmeeting module for IP Masq, and why there currently isn't one at all for Kernel 2.4.x. Very few Linux geeks particularly care about Microsoft Netmeeting

I can't blame them. But it's for those reasons that I'm using WinXP as a server... and this is my explanation for all the people who think it's a horrific thing to do