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Geek heaven! Is this a case of ‘Do as we say, don’t do as we do‘?
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.
According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft’s own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.
An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment, except to confirm that Microsoft is a customer.
Or just a case of ‘sleeping with the enemy’?
[My thanks to Boris Kuperschmidt who posted this item to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
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Oh the do as we say not as we do at Microsoft goes back farther than this.
When they bought hotmail, they were going to switch it to NT servers from FreeBSD, as a demonstration of how ‘robust’ MS technology is. The portions they converted couldn’t handle the load, and couldn’t be administered well in the large numbers needed. It still runs on FreeBSD.
And they couldn’t manage their own email network when they switched to Exchange, but had to hire Digital to do it for them.
So they can’t even eat their own dog food, as the saying goes.
Hi David,
There’s lot of other stories which circulate out here in Unix world. The main one I’ve heard, is that when Microsoft bought Hotmail, they found all the Hotmail servers were Solaris Unix ones.
They tried to strip all these out and replace them with Windows NT servers, but they kept crashing Hotmail, so they had to wheel the mothballed Solaris ones back in.
Which caused Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun, Microsoft’s bitterest rival, no end of joy, as Microsoft became his biggest customer in Washington State! 🙂
When the press found out about this, all Microsoft would say was that some of the Hotmail servers were Solaris, and some of them were NT.
Yeah, right! Like the Windows NT box in the corner of the datacentre used to control the air-conditioning! 🙂
And so, back to work…
This is actually a brilliant move by MS……some stats I saw a few weeks back, I think it was at OSNews.com, some 50% of all viruses and other forms of attack on MS’s operations eminate from *NIX based boxes.
MS is starting to use PhysicOps against the “script kiddies”…..this should be fun to watch.
Andy, everything I read/heard at the time and since Microsoft/MSN bought Hotmail suggests that the Hotmail service was handled purely by FreeBSD server-side and not Solaris. No doubt Scott McNealy wishes Hotmail had been operating with Solaris but I do not believe it was the case in 1998 at the time of the purchase and hasn’t been since.