Microsoft Is Using Linux To Protect Its Own Web Site

[evildave]

http://www.internetweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=13100775

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux is not fit for the enterprise. But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service attacks.

[Diamond]

:D

New irony-meters all round....

[BobK]

I find that rather ironic.:cool:

[heath]

nice story, [edit] more detail from the reg.

theregister.co.uk article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32385.html)

[Jim_MDP]

Well, kinda. They're just dumping their problem on someone else (Akamai) by pulling the redirect. But the story will flourish. :D

--
"A computer is a lot like an air-conditioner, it works better without windows."
--

And you gotta love The Reg...from a couple years ago during the "Love Bug" outbreak...

Gratuitous piece of Unix smuggery

You also may be interested in another variant of the virus currently running around linux user groups here (quoted below):

Subject: Unix variant of "love bug"

This virus works on the honor system:

If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random."


:D

[Segnosaur]

I don't know if this situation is related to a problem Microsoft had a few years ago... (can anyone fill in details? I don't have the time to research it right now)

Several years ago, microsoft's web servers got knocked off the internet. You could still access thier web sites if you knew the IP address, but you couldn't use the domain names.

The problem was due to several factors; a Denial of Service attack on their doman name servers (I think...), plus a very bad design where they had all their domain name servers on one network segment (so that if that one segment went down, all of the servers were inaccessible.)

Now, to provide robustness, Microsoft hired an external company to run redundant servers. This other company was supposedly running Linux.

So, can anyone fill in any details? Is this company the same as mentioned in this article?

[shanek]

Not the first time. Microsoft's entire website used to be run on FreeBSD. And Hotmail used to run on Linux. After someone exposes this, it's not too long before they move it over to a Microsoft server...and it starts having a lot of problems. :D

[Segnosaur]

Originally posted by shanek
Not the first time. Microsoft's entire website used to be run on FreeBSD. And Hotmail used to run on Linux. After someone exposes this, it's not too long before they move it over to a Microsoft server...and it starts having a lot of problems. :D

Are you sure about that? I've never heard that Microsoft used Linux on its web site (well, other than contracting out some DNS functionality), but as far as I know, Hotmail was running a combination of FreeBSD and Solaris

See:
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1998/06/03/57.asp
http://www.hpcwire.com/dsstar/01/0619/103190.html
http://aa11.cjb.net/sun_managers/1998/05/msg00148.html

[Yahweh]

Boohoo, Microsoft uses Linux servers. There is such a thing as "too much Microsoft" ya know....

[shanek]

Originally posted by Segnosaur
Are you sure about that? I've never heard that Microsoft used Linux on its web site

Its main website was FreeBSD, not Linux. Hotmail used to be run on Linux. And at the time, anyone could look at the HTTP headers (or, more easily, check it out with Netcraft.com) and see for themselves.

but as far as I know, Hotmail was running a combination of FreeBSD and Solaris

As I recall, Linux was used for the home page site, FreeBSD and Solaris were used for back-end work.

[shanek]

Originally posted by Yahweh
Boohoo, Microsoft uses Linux servers. There is such a thing as "too much Microsoft" ya know....

Not to hear Microsoft talk about it.

[Shadowhawk]

I seem to remember that Hotmail, before MS bought it, ran on a *nix or BSD platform.

Sometime after they acquired Hotmail, they decided to port it over to IIS.

I think the site was down for about a week.

[Segnosaur]

Originally posted by shanek


As I recall, Linux was used for the home page site, FreeBSD and Solaris were used for back-end work.

I think your memory might be a bit wrong on this. I haven't found anything that ever mentioned Linux ever being used by Hotmail, and any source that I did see mentions FreeBSD (and Apache) for the web server and Solaris for the back end work.


As a side note: Here's yet another article on Microsoft's use of 'Linux', right from the Netcraft site: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/17/wwwmicrosoftcom_runs_linux_up_to_a_point_.html
(It has some of the same information that was in the register article, but goes into some extra technical details about how Microsoft uses an outside company to cache their web pages, but uses Windows for the actual servers themselves.)

[Checkmite]

While Microsoft running Linux is somewhat humorous, I see no reason to get upset/worried/overworked/pompous about it and launch one's self into some kind of "exposure" campaign. Who cares?