[ISN] Microsoft Hotmail still runs on U**x

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Thu Dec 13 2001 - 00:35:15 PST

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    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.html
    
    By Andrew Orlowski
    Posted: 12/12/2001 at 13:51 GMT
    
    Microsoft admits it still hasn't upgraded its Hotmail system to
    Windows, almost four years after embarking on the task, and fifteen
    months after the first load balancing machines began to be shifted to
    Windows 2000 from FreeBSD.
    
    The snippet emerged in the latest pissing contest between Oracle and
    Microsoft, the details of which are too boring to go into here,
    because you've heard them so many times before.
    
    But a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters yesterday that Hotmail is
    the only Microsoft system that runs on U**x, and that the migration is
    still in progress. A check with Netcraft shows that Hotmail's front
    edge servers do indeed run Windows 2000, so Microsoft can faithfully
    claim that the "web site runs Windows", as it did yesterday. But the
    infrastructure is still stored on BSD kit. How much we're not sure,
    but when we receive hard numbers, we'll tell you.
    
    The Hotmail migration is becoming the IT equivalent of
    painting-the-Forth-bridge, evidently. Once you've think you've
    finished migrating one end, more FreeBSD boxes reappear at the other.  
    So you have to start all over again.
    
    Register Bridgenote: We're pretty sure the idiom refers to the older
    Forth Railway Bridge, although the Forth Road Bridge, opened in 1964,
    also requires represents a Herculean paint-job. In any case, here's a
    page about the very lovely Forth Railway Bridge, one of the wonders of
    the world.
    
    
    
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