Microsoft Hotmail still runs on U**x

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

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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