The last month or so, I've been watching a lot of clabretro's videos. If you find this sort of thing interesting (old enterprise software, and possibly the old servers/equipment that would run that software), you'll definitely like his channel! His retrorack is more from the early 2000s rather than the late 2000s, but there's probably still a good amount of cross over between what you're both doing.

https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro

None of the Windows side of that is tremendously far-removed from today.

Syteline... Progress... Ugh. I'm having trouble overcoming the violent undulations of my spleen. So many memories of performance issues, "dump and reload" of databases, and Progress clustering issues (though that was with QAD ERP and not Symix/Syteline).

Just a heads up, There was a lot of problems running RSAT (Remote Admin GUI Tools) on Vista when interacting with 2008 R2. Windows 7 quickly became required for 2008 R2. (Windows 7 is client OS of 2008 R2)

Otherwise, rock on.

It doesn’t feel that 2009 is all that far away but… 17 years ago. I remember a lot of forums during 09” in fringe commodore groups and amiga. And they still go on.

But yes 2009 was a different time, to be a sysadmin all you had to effectively know was how to reinstall an OS and drivers and you were golden.

Funny; Vista was the reason I switched to Linux as well.