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Burgers in Biryani Land

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The statistics say it all for Microsoft’s India development center. From 20

people and two products in August ‘98, the company’s India center has now

grown to 120 engineers and has four products in it’s kitty–Services For Unix

(SFU), VJ#.net, Windows server components and add-ons for Office XP. Not only

this, encouraged by the performance of its development center in the country,

the software major is planning to scale up its operation in India and assign new

product development responsibility to the team.

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According to Srini Koppolu, managing director, Microsoft India Development

Center, his team is also working on some new ideas, the proposals of which have

been forwarded to the company’s Redmond headquarters. While declining to

specify or elaborate on the details of the product-in-pipeline, Koppolu

suggested that the new product would be in the finance management segment. He

also said that the company’s internal target is to increase the strength of

the India center to 300 engineers by the end of next year. However, as the

existing 50,000 square feet facility can accommodate only 200 developers, the

company also plans to create a new facility soon. ‘‘We are confident about

achieving our target but will think about a new facility only when time comes,’’

said Koppolu.

SFU

3.0: The Add-Ons
Features Description
NFS

Client
Sticky/setuid/setgid

bits support
Symbolic

links support
Additional

language options
NFS

Server
Support

for active-active clustering of NFS shares
sticky/setuid/setgid

bits support
Per share

handling of root and anonymous access
Improved

model for mapping Windows NT <-> UNIX
Mapping

Server
Cluster-enabled

mapping
Performance,

security and scalability improvements
Support

for redundant mapping servers
Server

for NIS
Suport for

MD5 encryption
Scalability

and performance improvements
Password

Sync
Support

for setting password using pluggable authentication model on UNIX
Telnet

Server
Security

and scalability improvements
IPv6

support
Dumb

terminal support (handheld)
Telnet

Client
IPv6

support
Interix All new

services for UNIX and improved since version 2.2 of Interix

As of now, the hottest thing at the development center–also the reason why

the Hyderabad facility was opened up for a seven-member media team from Delhi–is

the new version 3.0 of SFU. According to Koppulu, the product that provides

seamless integration between Windows and Unix platforms has been conceptualized

and developed from scratch at the Indian center. What this means is that the

India center also has an independent responsibility and ownership for the

development of SFU.

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SFU 3.0



Since its introduction in 1999, Windows SFU has played a major role for

those trying to make Windows and UNIX networks co-exist. Microsoft claims that

the version 3.0, will not only be easier to use and run much faster, it would

also have built-in Interix technology for the compilation of UNIX based

applications on the Windows platform. Besides, the new product would also

provide better application portability and reliability among others. According

to Koppulu, the addition of Interix was based on user feed back and is important

because it allows system administrators to compile and natively run UNIX

programs and scripts on three versions of Windows–NT, 2000 and XP. The Interix

subsystem and utilities replace the previously provided UNIX Korn Shell and

utilities with a new POSIX compliant subsystem and a full set of utilities and

shells. Besides having both C and Korn shell, it also provides support for a

single rooted file system and symbolic links.

‘‘SFU 3.0 has been designed to work with a broad range of UNIX and Linux

platforms and uses industry standard protocols and utilities,’’ Koppulu said

adding, ‘‘We have explicitly tested it for interoperability with Solaris 2.6

and 2.7, HP-UX 10.2 and 11, AIX 4.3.3 and Red Hat Linux 7.0.’’ The product

is scheduled for production in May and would probably be launched in the global

market in the third quarter of this calendar year.

SHUBHENDU PARTH in Hyderabad

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