Slashdot Mirror

I'd imagine it's a similar situation as described here.

While initially, it may seem that Microsoft may not be able to use its OS leverage against Google because it is a server-based application, perhaps the precense of Microsoft IIS market share may have influence. They have already demonstrated that, despite the open standards of the web, they still attempt to lock-in users to their software.

Microsoft may somehow enable websites hosted on IIS to work with their search engine more efficiently than the way Google works with regular sites. Even though IIS doesn't have majority market share, it still has 22.68% at the moment. This still may be an advantage. Google does provide a search appliance for intranets and public websites, which probably integrates with the main Google search engine (I'm just guessing). But I doubt Google search appliances are anywhere near as commonplace as IIS servers.

I guess this must be an error but Netcraft shows the site as running on Linux...?

Clicked next - suddenly, "Sorry, there a no results for 'eruvia'". Pardon? Try searching again from scratch, and once again suddenly Eruvia has disappeared. Can't get my original 15 results back at all.

I'm putting this down to extremely ungraceful load handling and the ongoing Slashdotting. What's this running on anyway? Netcraft says IIS/6.0 on Linux, so it's another Akamai job, but the hardware behind it doesn't seem up to scratch yet.

Cheers,
Ian

It is slow as shit. Just signed up today actually.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.orku t.com
Think they need to reboot that(those) leaky IIS box(es)

Am I the only one who is at least slightly bothered by the fact that google is famous for using thousands of linux machines, and yet orkut runs on active server pages on top of iis? Netcraft says:
http://orkut.com was running Microsoft-IIS on unknown when last queried at 30-Jun-2004 06:19:37 GMT

I would suspect that these folks could *easily* develop a plugin adaptor for MSIE.

Geez, everyone else seems to be able to! ..Can't be that hard... ;o)

--J

> How about the lion and ramen worms from 2001?

Those examples are three years old, the number of Linux systems affected was small (compared to most Windows viruses or worms), and they disappeared quickly.

Meanwhile, some Windows viruses and worms continue to make the rounds many months later, and new Windows (IE is part of the OS) exploits and variations appear every month.

And don't say it's because of a lack of Linux systems, because there are just as many Linux-based Internet servers as Windows-based (see Netcraft chart from 2001).

So if those are the best examples you have, then I'm feeling quite good about my choice of Linux.

Now if you are providing those examples as proof that no OS, including Linux, is 100% secure, then I have to say that no prrof was necessary, because no one is claiming that Linux is completely virus-proof. The only claim is that Linux is _more_ secure than Windows, in fact, Linux is _inherently_ more secure than Windows because of better design decisions, and because Linux is Open Source.

2) IE is wildly used, so very attractive to find a security bug in it (for malicious activities).

I see this argument used a lot, but it's wrong. You're confusing correlation with causation; IE is widely used, and a lot of security flaws are found in it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the flaws are found because it's widely used.

For a counter-example, take a look at web servers. 67.05% of web servers run Apache, according to Netcraft. In comparision, 21.48% of web servers are using Microsoft's IIS. Why is it, then, that new security flaws are constantly found in IIS, but flaws in Apache are discovered much more rarely?

Robyn Eckard, a spokeswoman for the Irvine, Calif.-based Kelley Blue Book, said the company learned about the problem late Wednesday after Web site visitors said their antivirus software tipped them off to the code. Eckard said Kelly Blue Book removed the malicious code from its site by late Thursday afternoon.

There wasn't any mention of their site being down so that means a period of what could be almost a full day where they knew their website was infecting customers with this virus but continued to let it run. Are they really allowed to do that? Perhaps they figgured the bad PR or loss of buisness from their site being down would be greater than the bad PR and loss of buisness by their customers being infected by this thing then possibly robbed when their bank info was lifted. Perhaps the article was just mistaken, google returns multiple sites and at netcraft I can't make heads or tails of the first one but the second site appears to have remained up could they be charged for this it seems kinda like one of those people with AIDS who doesn't tell partners thier infected and goes around having unprotected sex.

You can check a site's vulnerability though at Netcraft's What's That Site Running? It will tell you if a site is running Microsoft-IIS or something different.

You sure of that? This exploit is affecting IIS, and Bank of America runs Solaris

As someone else already pointed out, the page is hosted with IIS on a Windows 2000 system.

It really is IIS for some strange reason.

Ah, too bad their web site looks to be running on Windows.

They used some of their surplus merchandise to run their website....

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.sub5 00.com

Of course, your argument falls apart when you're dealing with a competent network admin who locks down systems and installs AV software.

Competently-admined systems are not the problem, it's the millions of unsecured Windows boxes sitting on cable and DSL, whose owners can't even be bothered to run Windows Update once in a while much less renew their AV subscription when it expires or download, install and regularly use Spybot.

Also, backward compatibility isn't the real reason that MS is targeted, it's marketshare. I bet if Apple had more people using their OS, there'd be more people targeting OS X.

Please explain why Apache, which enjoys a significantly larger marketshare than IIS, also has signficantly fewer exploits for it. Now whose argument falls apart?

~Philly

Anyhow, IIS used to outnumber Apache installs, until ...

When did IIS outnumber Apache ?
Netcraft Totals

He was, but then his boss found him out.

Netcraft confirms!

Netcraft confirms!

Yeah, we pipe up every now and then. But the long uptimes give us lots of time to sleep or go on vacation. ;)

>BBC seems to be very in favor of Linux, lately.

The superb BBC News website has used Linux for some time now. Netcraft stats here. It's just a shame that all their online multimedia content seems to be based around Real Audio :-(

Matt

Well, Microsoft can at least claim credit for running the show over at the special olympics. The reboot frequency seems to be hovering around 9 days on average. But please don't call IIS unstable, it's simply uptime challenged.

"Akamai is confirming that network outages this morning were caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that affected its DNS management system.
The performance problems affected Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and antivirus update services from Symantec and TrendMicro, which are among Akamai's 1,100 customers. Some of the largest affected sites were able to switch their DNS settings to their internal network, rather than akadns.net, which handles domain name service management for Akamai customers. The akadns.net system routs requests for high-volume customer web pages to content stored on its network of distributed servers, easing traffic to the client's main server and speeding delivery to the end user. Akamai performs similar function for downloads of audio and video files, software patches and antivirus definitions.

The outages mark the second disruption of Akamai's network in less than a month, following a similar incident May 24. "
-
Netcraft

"Yahoo and Google have both been hit by a DoS attack. The attack has been hitting Google, Yahoo, and other sites that include Microsoft for the past couple of hours. The attacks started this morning and it was detected by Keynote Systems, a web tracking company that is able to track the load and bandwidth on the Internet. According to Keynote they saw an "Internet performance issue" this morning.

"The availability issues were limited to several large sites, all of whom outsource their domain name server (DNS) services to Akamai. These sites dropped to near-zero availability," a spokesman for Keynote said. They have tracked the attacker back to person that is at the Akamai Technologies ISP. No other information has been given to us at this time. We do not know if the FBI is working on this issue right now, but we expect them to do so. "

- OverclockersClub

Netcraft confirms it: BSD isn't dying! Ever. Seriously though, his statistics about FreeBSD are incorrect, but check out this list. At the time I posted, The only ones on the list are FreeBSD and BSD/OS. No Linux. No Windows. No Solaris. Nothing but FreeBSD and BSD/OS. BSD/OS has the most systems, but FreeBSD has the top two slots.

Netcraft runs FreeBSD...

nope -- OSX counts as Darwin.

The proof is in the pudding:
lookup of www.apple.com.

No. apple.com

sorta offtopic, but I just finished with the two lastest BSD articles, and when I got to this one, and with the heavy image loads and whatnot, and now not only being slashdotted but also being referenced in a ton of other online news places, etc, I figured I'd take a peek and see what is that site running? at netcraft. Hmm, well neither BSD nor linux, it's running solaris 8 using netscape server. Just a FWIW.

over one million new domains were hosted on FreeBSD over the last year

Since OS X (Darwin) is based on FreeBSD, does this mean that the Netcraft figures counted OS X Server hosts as FreeBSD?

The latest publicly available Netcraft data for SSL is unfortunately only from 2001.

It shows that MS has about 1/2 of the SSL market.

From their FAQ:

Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days.

The *BSDs is very neat, and will probably be my OS of choice on my next computer (selling my mac and either getting a laptop or desktop PC), but lets not get carried away ;)

-Tezkah, user 7 of 7!?

Why Some Sites Only Work With IE

If you surf the web with a browser like Firefox, Netscape, or Opera, you've probably run into sites that either require Internet Explorer or look very poor in non-IE browsers.

I previously thought this was due to laziness on the part of web developers. Events of the past days have made me think something else may be at play.

I'm a software developer at a very large company. Recently, the company underwent a reorganization. I now work for a different business unit. To make a long story short, this business unit does not give employees permission to install software on their desktop computers. They don't just prohibit it, they flat out prevent it via Windows administrator settings.

This means I have to use the corporation's approved; web browser: Internet Explorer. And, it means I can't even install Firefox or Opera to test my web designs.

Luckily, the team I work with is pushing the corporate bureaucracy to give us more rights to our machines. But I wonder how many people go through that effort, or how many of them succeed? Can policies like this - where the web developer can't even test their site in a non-IE browser - explain why some sites don't work in other browsers?

Not much too it. Note that no examination of the page was made for booby traps of any kind. Also a number of "#8271" were removed. The text claims it was generated by word press. spacerook uses apache on linux and is a lunarpages site.

FreeBSD and BSD/OS are beating any OS. Just visit Sites with longest running systems by average uptime.

Psst, you didn't read the latest memo....

Um, Netcraft confirms problems for Trolls:
June 8th 2004 Netcraft confirms FreeBSD growth to 5M hosts and 2.5M active websites

Or maybe BSD...

Apache has twice the market share of microsoft IIS.

Actually, the current Netcraft survey puts Apache market share at 67% and IIS market share at 21%. That's a little more than triple. Don't know how IIS servers masquerading as Apache affect their survey, though.

The White Mountain Apache Tribe does run Apache, however.

Too bad they ain't running Apache... maybe they've had bad experiences in the past?

you mean linux? Hmmm... good point. that was dumb. I keep forgetting that they actually were caldera at one point in time.

No, not linux. Maybe that UnixWare thing? Or OpenServer? Or maybe microsoft paid them with windows licenses for their contiuned litigation, so that's what they run?

Funny thing is - I checked them out and found that they are violating SCO license. I mean, we all know that SCO owns unix and recalled the AIX license, and yet they are using AIX on their website!

Oh, and 2001? isn't your article a bit dated...

And finally This Shows that hotmail is currently under IIS5.0. I'm no microsoft troll, but as someone said, they are 'eating their own dog food' on this one.

Further proof that they're dying? :-)

Umm, right now, that's the definition.

From Miguel's Netcraft interview (also linked on Slashdot):
-----Start--------
Q. What do you see as the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source?

A. Microsoft realises today that Linux is competing for some of the green pastures that it's been enjoying for so long; I think that Longhorn is a big attempt to take back what they owned before. Longhorn has kind of a scary technology called Avalon, which when compounded with another technology called XAML, it's fairly dangerous. And the reason is that they've made it so it's basically an HTML replacement. The advantage is it's probably as easy as writing HTML, so that means that anybody can produce this content with a text editor.

It's basically an HTML Next Generation. A lot more widgets, a lot more flexibility, more richer experience - way, way richer experience. You get basically the native client experience with Web- like deployments. So you develop these extremely rich applications but they can be deployed as easily as the Web is. It's just like going to a URL: you go to Google, and you get the Web page and it works. So it's the same deployment model but the user interface interaction is just fantastic.

Of course, the only drawback is that this new interaction is completely tied to .Net and WinFX. So we see that as a very big danger. A lot of people today cannot migrate to Linux or cannot migrate to Mozilla because a lot of their internal Web sites happen to use IE extensions. Now imagine a world where you can only use XAML.

It's massive - I'm so scared.
------END--------

So take your flame elsewhere. Web services are currently SOAP over HTTP. Web services will become XAML, essentially .NET extensions. And that has everything to do with browsers, and platforms.

heh... it's probably biased since Netcraft is running FreeBSD too.

nice to see it's growing, zeitgeist [google.com] still shows a pitiful 1% though

On the other hand, the Netcraft Web Server Survey shows 67% of the machines running Apache, and most of them run Linux or FreeBSD

I have numerous friends who use FreeBSD, many because of me. More are coming. My webhost uses FreeBSD and the new one I'm switching to does as well. In fact, most of the sites with the longest uptime run FreeBSD or some *BSD.

The supported hardware is broader than the list suggests, because the list is mostly by chipsets. You'll find LOTS of different products that all use the same chipset. I've found that if you're unsure, just ask... people in the community will help you figure it out. I got a video-capture card for xmas that has worked like a charm. Watching TV in a box on my desktop is nice. I've watched DVDs, had no problems with my sound, get hardware-accel 3D on my video card, network card has always worked, as well as my wireless mouse. All the rest of my hardware besides the video-capture card is the same stuff I had when I ran Windows 2000 (which I bought without knowing I'd be ditching Windows for FreeBSD) and it all worked great when I switched. The ports system kicks ass. Upgrading is a cinch. The OS is very stable. I'm happy.

I, too, was at first impressed when I saw that.

However, if you check out their FAQ here, you will see that the uptime cannot be measured that high for HP-UX, Linux or Solaris. Therefore, this really doesn't say much other than the fact that BSD's uptime counter is programmed better than other Unices.

I swear that I'm no BSD zealot, but that's pretty impressive.