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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.
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.