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Hotmail Servers Shut Down by Code Red
An Anonymous Coward writes: "SF Gate has this story about Code Red taking down some of Microsoft's Hotmail servers. That's funny." So is Code Red a problem yet? Meanwhile my sircams have stopped, except for 2 people who mail me a hundred or more a day. Thank god for filters, but if I had a monthly bandwidth cap, I'd be pissed.
I find it amazing that they didn't take every precaution to protect what might be their highest-profile property. If MSDN went down, they could cover it - Most of their other servers, too. But Hotmail? That's so closely associated with Passport and, by association, dot-net, that I think they would do absolutely everything in their power to keep it spotless in the minds of the users.
Good luck to them. They'll need it.
I got two unsolicited calls asking how to set up Apache on a Windows 2000 server. These were people who had never seen a need to switch before. If I convert their servers for them, I'll probably set up a Linux box or two, 'just for backup purposes'.
Heh heh.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Except that the EULA, any EULA, is absolute and total bullshit, except in Maryland and Virginia(?) who think UCITA makes sense.
You can't make addendums to a contract after the sale without agreement from both sides. Clicking a button or hitting a key does not constitute proof of agreement. That requires a signature. Please help spread the news that EULA's are bullshit until they are upheld in a court of law or supported by legislation. At the present, they are just some grandstanding bullshit from rich software companies with nothing more than threats from lawyers standing behind them.
BTW, did I mention that EULAs are BULLSHIT mumbo-jumbo legalese that don't have the force of spit.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The sad part is, they probably don't. More likely, they're wishing it was illegal to be a programmer outside a regular, certified company. That way, those damn hackers couldn't exist, and only companies would produce software, for the only good reason there is to produce software, money.
And the worse is, I'm barely being satirical here. It's really what they corporate culture seems to promote, as has been proved too many times... Maybe I'm just being an overreacting idiot, but they've given me that impression so many times...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
And this the company whose software that the vast majority of ISPs insist that you use if you want to connect to the internet using their lines.
I think I'll have some new ammunition the next time I get into an argument with an ISP over what software I'm allowed to run.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
We discussed this one year ago this week. It was concluded that they were running a round-robin DNS, and you'd sometimes get Apache (~20% of the time) and sometimes get IIS 5.0 (~80% of the time.) To run your own experiment, try the script that I included at the time.
/var/tmp/hotmail
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>
let i="$i"+1
done
-Waldo
Ok, I know it's a lot of servers, but the company that runs Hotmail, also wrote the OS that is insecure. This company release a warning, what, like 6 months ago, and also released a patch at the same time. They have been claiming that this is a major security hole since then and strongly encourages everybody to install the patch, yet they themselves don't.
Somehow, when I picture a server farm, I see this clean, organized room with nice neat racks. With everything that happens with MS's servers, all I can envision is a building reminiscent of a level from Diablo. Something dark & gloomy with servers just sitting on workbenches with their hard drives just hanging out of the side of the case and the motherboard coated in 1/2" of dust.
How can you forget a bunch of servers. I work for a small ISP so we're not the most organized place, but hell, all we have is two racks for modems & routers, and a dozen boxes sitting on the floor for servers. But we at least have pieces of paper tacked to the wall with a list of IP addresses, server names, functions and OS. We install the patches on all of our machines just fine.
All you need is a list of all the servers. Then take that list around with you and after you install the patch, put a little "X" next to the server on the list. Not really complex guys. Of course this is Microsoft, they're probably running little handhelds with WinCE, connecting wirelessly to a MSSQL server that seems to simply misplace records for the hell of it.