Longhorn stripped to the core

For years, in fact since the beginning,  Microsoft have been critisised over the complexity of their serviver operating system and recently over the resulting large attack service.  The response is Longhorn Server Core:

Server Core is a new minimal server installation option for Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 1. Server Core provides an environment for running specific Server Roles, reducing the servicing and management requirements for those Server Roles. Server Core supports the following Server Roles:

·      DHCP server

·      File Server

·      DNS

·      Active Directory®

The Server Core installation option is designed to provide a minimal environment to run the above Server Roles and reduce:

·      Required servicing

·      Required management

·      Attack surface

To accomplish this, the Server Core installation option installs only a subset of the Server binaries, those that are required by the above four server roles. For example, the Explorer Shell is not installed as part of Server Core. Instead, when using a Server Core based server, the default user interface is the command prompt.