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Microsoft/Unisys Unix-bashing Site Runs FreeBSD
Several people sent in variations on this: "Kind of ironic to see that the the site, dubbed WeHaveTheWayOut from Microsoft and Unisys runs on an Apache Web server powered by FreeBSD. This could have made a great April Fools joke, unfortunately for Microsoft, you can verify it by using Netcraft." This is a follow-up to the original story a few days ago. Other readers noted that there's already a WeHaveTheWayIn site up. Wehavethewayout.com was returning Apache headers yesterday; today it's returning "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0", so it appears they've dumped FreeBSD in a hurry, or maybe just changed the headers.
Wehavethewayout.com was returning Apache headers yesterday; today it's returning "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0", so it appears they've dumped FreeBSD in a hurry, or maybe just changed the headers.
Somehow, I doubt it's a big conspiracy. As someone suggested in the Netcraft story this morning, they probably just moved the domain from their marketing firm's hosting farm to their own box or something.
Not that the fact that their own marketing firm won't eat the dog food isn't funny, but this isn't front page news by a long shot.
--saint
The people who generally could find out this information about the site are techies who for hte most part hate MS with no chance of Rehabilitation. MS doesnt care becuase the ppl comming to there site for legit use of THIER product have no idea they are running BSD or let alone know what BSD is.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Wehavethewayout.com was returning Apache headers yesterday; today it's returning "Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
Oh? I'm getting this from Netcraft:
The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD
Rapidsite/Apa? Some mutant form of Apache? In any case, it's still reporting FreeBSD.
--Jim
The Way Out People have already changed the HTTP headers for the site. I wonder if they actually changed the server, though. Is there a non-felony way to get other information about the server?
Miko O'Sullivan
Cisco PR company uses 3Com switches. Neither Cisco or their PR company spokesman were available to comment.
This is news? Who gives a shit what webserver propaganda is run on? People are not quite getting it around here, sometimes...
ZDNet owns com.com, and all their sites branch off of it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
CNET owns com.com. Stupid, yes. Hoax, no.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Firstly, the ad campaign is about data centers and "big iron", not web servers (i.e. Unisys isn't really about selling low end web serving machines). As such the deployed HTTP platform becomes irrelevant.
Secondly, Unisys apparently contracted an outside vendor, and that vendor just happened to use Apache (and for static content it really, truly doesn't matter. Static HTTP is about as complex as notepad.exe). It's odd that there's a seemingly mixed attitude on Slashdot: One says that Microsoft is an evil beast bashing the world to conform to its ways, and another is a mocking when Microsoft isn't bashing people to conform to their ways. Which do you want?
On the other hand:
bash$ telnet www.wehavethewayout.com 80
Trying 130.94.214.143...
Connected to www.wehavethewayout.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wehavethewayout.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
Content-Location: http://www.wehavethewayout.com/index.html
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 14:16:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 22:54:12 GMT
ETag: "575c4824d0d9c11:4a6b5"
Content-Length: 9766
Is Netcraft returning cached information?
--Jim
they didn't just change the HTTP headers. nmap reporst:
:)
Remote OS guesses: Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1 through final release, MS Wind
ows2000 Professional RC1/W2K Advance Server Beta3, Windows Millenium Edition v4.
90.3000
it also reports a number of interesting ports as open:
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop-3
443/tcp open https
1433/tcp open ms-sql-s
2105/tcp open eklogin
3306/tcp open mysql
5900/tcp open vnc
whoever set this up did it in a real hurry.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Of course they were running on unix themselves! They were locked in, they were unable to stop paying for the expensive so called unix 'experts'. They were *hoping* we could ALL find a way out TOGETER.
Liberty.
They are running two servers at two different IPs. Apparently 130.94.214.143 is running their Windows 2000 IIS server and 198.63.57.204 is still running the Apache server on FreeBSD.
I guess what I am saying is "so what". Microsoft has disclosed the use of Linux for business critical function in their board report a few years ago. We also know that while eBay runs on IIS, the work really is on their database systems, which are on Sun equipment (AFAIK).
Click here or here.
Shall we?
t .comx hit.com
www.anna-nicole-smith-nude.com
www.ex-microsof
www.cannabis.com
www.dykesworld.de
www.se
www.germanparts.com
Don't know about that last one... but I'm not going to visit it.
Plus, slashbots, get this: THE IP CHANGED from 198.63.57.204 to 130.94.214.143. They're both hosted by Verio. Maybe that's all they had available at the time, before they moved to a dedicated server. Ooh, here's another idea: who the fuck cares? It's like saying that since the Zone runs Linux on their stats page... Lynch them! Lynch them!
97.4% of slashdot users, the popular Microsoft bashing site, are using Internet Explorer.
The 'We have the way in' site is a great riposte to the Microsoft/Unisys site, and the kind of activism that is great to see from the OSS community.
A few points:
1) Why don't we make a list of ways the site can be made better, to help the Linux Freak guys? Bear in mind that this is aimed at pointy haired bosses.
2) How can we make sure that this is seen by people? Improve it's ranking in Google etc.
3) Remember it's aimed at PHBs - they're sensitive types. I think the site as it is is done very well, but even things like linking to the linuxfreak site might upset a PHB.
Come on guys, let's help this postitive activism rather than moan about Microsoft all the time!
Then, if you know your PHB has been infected by the Microsoft anti-Unix marketing meme, you can point him towards this site.
Great work LinuxFreaks.
The FreeBSD server that was originally hosting the site is still up. If you look at the Netcraft page here you can see the IP address of the new Win2K server is 130.94.214.143 where as the IP of the FreeBSD one is 198.63.57.204. Both are working at the moment though I doubt this will be the case for many more hours.
Someone also suggested earlier that the domain was being transfered from a hosting service to MS but you can see that the IPs are both in Verio's netblock so thats not the case. My guess would be that MS/Unisys saw/were told what was being used to host the site and said they wanted it moved to a Win2K box. We've just experienced the delay as the DNS updates.
How long until they get hacked then? A high profile campaign like this is bound to bring out all the kiddies and some of the not-so-kiddies. Maybe we should have a sweekstake? :-)
Cheers...
The interesting thing here is that the original site
is still online: http://198.63.57.204
Here's a little netcat "chat" I had with the old server
So it in some sense still runs FreeBSD
RavenZ
I'm running it in wine.
;-)
They probably used FreeBSD initially on purpose. Then once the word was out in the tech community, they switched. Now then they have a lot of traffic from us geeks checking their headers to show potential converts how many folks are jumping on the site to get info on replacing UNIX.
So, we are in essence facilitating them by continuing to check the site.
Has anyone noticed that if you click the "JOIN" button on that site that the functionality is implemented in JSP? So the anti-Unix site is using BSD/Apache and Java. Nice.
...and they can't afford a firewall.
On behalf of Unix Engineers everywhere: Thank you Unisys. Thank you, Microsoft.
I'm reading some of the earlier posts... With people saying this is not news..
What? Do you work for Microsoft or something?
This is pretty big news to me.... I mean the irony is killing me!
Mircosoft, the hater of all things linux and bsd, is using the said offensive material to run their site!
First off, that's just funny.
Second, obviously someone thought BSD was more secure to run a server.
Third, they know how to run a server off of BSD.
Now they'll switch from BSD to windows... That site will get hacked time and time again... Showing how secure it really is. They can spend on the money they want to on a slanderous campain, but the truth will be shown.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
URL 1: http://130.94.214.143/ (IIS)
connects_completed: 12373, responses_completed: 12373 (41.2433/sec), total_errors: 0
msecs/connect: 87.503 mean, 3082.84 max, 81.047 min, 81.308 95min, 84.234 95max
msecs/response: 87.5983 mean, 3098.43 max, 81.848 min, 82.295 95min, 91.204 95max
URL 2: http://198.63.57.204/ (BSD)
connects_completed: 12322, responses_completed: 12322 (41.0733/sec), total_errors: 0
msecs/connect: 17.4765 mean, 21009.6 max, 9.477 min, 9.75 95min, 12.135 95max
msecs/response: 47.6064 mean, 3013.33 max, 12.329 min, 12.651 95min, 162.082 95max
This is very unscientific, and it's only wrt to the index page on both sites. It'd be interesting to see a detailed side-by-side comparison of the two sites. How often will you get to compare a BSD machine against a Microsoft machine maintained by Microsoft themselves, hosting exactly the same content.
Yeah, I put my name and even a real email addy on their page. I doubt I'll get an answer though, seeing as I really took the piss out of them in the comments section.
Anyway, I hope they do send me some stuff, havent been sent any AOL disks for a while so I could do with some clean coasters.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
Now, wouldn't it be a terrible thing if that site got hacked and then the story got onto Cnet and Yahoo news!
Wouldn't that be terrible PR for Microsoft! Poor them! I do hope that doesn't happen. Especially bearing in mind that there must be a lot of people reading Slashdot who know how to do such a thing, and might be tempted to do it, or to post information about the open ports to mailing lists that black-hat hackers read. I do hope that doesn't happen, for Microsoft's sake. Poor them.
For those too lazy to click the link, fear a hidden goatse or find netcraft slow at the moment:
The site homepages.msn.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 on Solaris.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Just something I found humorous.
Did anybody else notice that their way out is a window the size of a small pet door. Of course the malnutritioned (sp?) geeks can fit through that but they don't really want to. It's the managers that are supposed to want to get away from *nix and they'd never fit through that hole.
Maybe the managers are just supposed to shove as many IT guys out the window as they can and hope for the best.
Anyways, back to M$ bashing.
impto, suspected troll
news.com.COM? Is that different from news.com?
rooooar
look at the other sites the hosting provider are hosting with netcraft.
top of their list:
ex-microsoft.com
Personal experience! I'm not just talking out of my backside. (however if I were talking out of my backside that wouldn't just be a fitting commentary/speculation on the origin on microsoft products, but DAMN FUNNY in its own right!)
Besides, what am I going to use at work, NETSCAPE?!! HA HA! If I keep netscape open for too long, I lose the ability to "click" on links.
Think about how useful websurfing is when you can't CLICK a link!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
here I noted that Unisys has many webservers running mostly WinNT, and run a variety of webserver sw on them mostly IIS but also Lotus Domino, and Netscape. And in at least one instance they run Apache on Red Hat Linux.
Also per this chart they also run Apache on two other 'unknown' Unix platforms.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
5900/tcp open vnc
Good job they're not running XP then or they'd be violating their own license
I use OmniWeb, thanks. If you configure it to identify as Internet Explorer, nearly every site will work just fine. However, if you leave it and let itself identify as OmniWeb, then you're denied all over the place.
Polling user agents out of the server logs is inaccurate, especially on a site like this.
As a Microsoft/Unisys PR manager, I would like to thank to everyone who made wehavethewayout popular.
Thanks to your obsessiveness about netcraft & pretty much useless arguments which web server you use to serve static web pages, we are actually able to make many CIO/CTO's register & have a look at what we have to offer in replacing big-irons hosting databases & directory servers(not web servers serving static web pages, in case you still havn't got it)
The best part was we never spent $1 on marketing this web-site, just released details to CNet.
Again, thanks to everyone, we never imagined we would get so many hits or people looking into it
Really, most people don't. I mean, I rarely hear someone make a comment like ``I'm not going to do business with them; look, their website runs on a machine from Bob's House of Discounted Server Software''. But, really, this is a lot to do with image. Techies drooling over Apache or chuckling at the guy using IIS aren't the people that are going to really take notice.
... uhh ... irony.''
It's the bosses, CxOs, and the like that are looking for a technology solution and see ``We can get you out of the trap of using Unix. Our stuff is just as good, and cheaper to boot, and will server your needs as well. Please ignore the fact that we're not using our own technology. We can still produce kickass stuff. We're just not using it outselves for
And those people are the ones that you don't want to pull a poorly handled shell game on, because, in the end, they're the ones that make the buying decisions.
-- My work here is done. If you need me again, just admit to yourself that you're screwed, and die.
..this IS news, and here's why:
:-)
Because there is no better product endorsement than to be seen in public "eating your own dogfood," or "putting your money where your mouth is." Conversely, there's nothing worse you can do to hurt a company's reputation than to work for them and be seen using the products of their competitor. This makes people wonder, "If Company A's product is supposed to be so good, how come a Company A employee, who probably gets it cheaper than Joe Schmoe consumer (or even free), still chooses Company B's competing product?"
This is why people who work at car dealerships are given demo cars for personal use. Would you want to buy a GM car from a salesman who drives to the dealership every day in a Toyota? Would you find his pitch about how GM cars are superior to all others very believable, when his personal funds went to buy a non-GM car?
I remember reading a couple months ago (and just Googled the article, 2nd from the top) that highly-paid Pepsi shill Britney Spears was photographed with Coca Cola products. Twice, in a rather short time frame. Pepsi publicly pooh-poohed this, but you can be sure that their PR people are chugging Pepto Bismol over it, because she holds sway over a nation of twelve year-old girls who want to be her-- which would entail them consuming Coke when they're not busy filming a commercial for Pepsi.
This is why it's news when Microsoft chooses someone else's product to run something, or when they fail when trying to replace a competing product with their own and end up proving that said Microsoft product doesn't live up to its marketing hype (e.g. Hotmail's original failed NT conversion). In this particular case, it's just a boneheaded mistake-- nobody thought to say, "Oh, by the way, let's make sure that our anti-UNIX site is running on IIS," but it's still noteworthy if for not other reason than because of the almost comical irony.
~Philly
That would explain both the poor performance, and the speed of the changeover.
Not that I'm defending anyone, just puking information..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I'm really pleased Slashdotters are just talking about hacking the site, rather than actually doing it. After all, I'm sure lots of people at Microsoft read Slashdot, so now they have been altered to the fact that their box is insecure and are probably making plans to secure it. I'm really pleased that people aren't hacking this as soon as possible, and causing Microsoft a terrible PR disaster. It's great that Microsoft is being given time to put a firewall in place. We wouldn't want embarassing PR for them, would we?
Frankly, I think Microsoft sees promotion of FreeBSD as:
1) An opensource OS it can reap benefits from without giving back
2) A way of fragmenting unix/linux, thus hurting microsoft's biggest threat: linux. Just as keeping Apple just lively enough to keep the justice department off their backs, I think they realize that splitting unix/linux into factions will keep microsoft stronger, relatively speaking. Both of these are things right out of go strategy, and Gates is a go player.
In other words, I wouldn't be surprised a bit if we were supposed to discover that the site is running FreeBSD.
Windows 2000? but I thought that XP pro was so good, everone should use it. So on a new server, they thought that windows 2000 was better than XP.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
ok this is it !!! you can download some unix binary files like the command 'ls' http://www.wehavethewayout.com/bin/ls there are some more, it looks like microsoft was to stupid to configure a freebsd server hahaha microsoft sucks bigtime !
I couldn't agree more. FreeBSD is absolutely Unix to the core. But with marketing types spreading FUD around, and The Open Group currently holding the Unix name hostage, there are differences. For example, on the freebsd.org webpage, up until a few months ago, the first paragraph read something like "FreeBSD is ... a BSD Unix," while now the page says "derived from BSD Unix" since The Open Group compained over trademark issues. Anyway, I just thought the distinction (however stupid it is) might be worth mentioning.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
"Hotmail's original failed NT conversion"
But Philly... That never happened. Why can't you Linux zealots come up with useful experiences and not rely upon myths and misinterpretations? Like that stupid Navy ship article that keeps getting misinterpreted.
The stories of hotmail switching over to NT came out only 2 months after the purchase of the website was announced. Anybody remotely familiar with corporate buyouts and software development knows that wasn't enough time. Furthermore, a search on deja.com reveals that there were no major outages of hotmail.com during that time frame, whereas nearly every other major outage of the service is easily found in the archives.
What we do know, from Microsoft articles, is that hotmail.com development switched over to Windows NT. In an effort to get higher performance, the CGI was rewritten in C++ and highly tuned on Windows NT development boxes. It was then recompiled for FreeBSD and deployed. They did this because NT offers better development/debug tools than what was available on FreeBSD.
We also know that hotmail.com eventually switched over to Windows 2000 on their web servers. I would have thought that conversion would have finally put an end to the myth, but apparently Linux zealots just can't get enough of revisiting the past.
BTW, I'm a GM employee who doesn't drive a GM car. There are actually quite a few of us, although I work in the GMAC financial side, not the auto manufacturing.
P.S. www.linux64.com runs on IIS5, so I guess that means Linux sucks, right?
We have the way out is just a big ad for UNISYS big iron. It also asks for personal information right up front. All they are hosting is their paid for reports. The rest of the content is at the UNISYS page. (Old news.)
The way in site is fast clean and friendly. Nothing is asked yet everything is given. Very open and honest compared to the definite marketing business feel of the other site.
Both sites share the same structure. This is fine for now, but probably should change as suggestions come in. Don't want to look like followers now do we?
Personally I would drag some dirt out of the closet about UNISYS and their use of the LZW patent. Clear simple and honest.
Blogging because I can...
What's really amusing is that, following their foray into UNIX, Unisys has returned to its roots. They're still selling servers that run OS 2200, the 36-bit OS descended from UNIVAC Exec 8 from the 1960s.
Your assertion is false as a matter of actual practice. Companies do actually use "big-iron" to consolidate large numbers of servers running "simple things" like webserving.
When you have 7000 servers, webserving becomes a big job.
Infact, IBM's big-iron is already being used in this capacity.
We get press releases from IBM about how some company is successfully using their Big Iron. Meanwhile, all Unisys can do is engage in slander.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They definitely are up to some weird, inconsistent shit, that is for sure. HTTP and POP both report Windows software; and someone else said the FTP server also did (read through the comments, here and there). But you can download /bin/ls and `strings` reports it is most definitely a FreeBSD ELF, complete with some rather obvious RCS $Id$ tags.
Liberty in your lifetime
Try and repeat this exercise with a Linux organization that we would have heard of before you started your whining.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the site is now completely blank LOL
Our stuff is just as good, and cheaper to boot, and will server your needs as well.
Shouldn't that be sever?
You think you are funny but you are really showing a lot of ignorance. The anti-MicroSoft site is selling Unix, not keyboards!
>photographed with Coca Cola products
about 10 years ago, our vegas brewing club (snafu) attended a lot of chili cookoffs, which generally benefitted some charity or another. We'd take contributions, and only tended to share our beer with those that had donated at our booth.
At one of these, our president, who was, uhh, outgoing, even when sober (if that ever happened
Believe it or not, they did, though their bodyguard was a bit uneasy. And not a single one of us had a bloody camera!!!!!
*sigh*
hawk
The site is just a blank page now.
How can we find out if the site has been hacked or not?
Something must have happened... Is there any way to tell if it's been hacked?
hawk, who might consider it, if they put in the four missing cylinders and added two tons of steel
If you try to look at the stats directory:
http://www.wehavethewayout.com/stats/
it asks for usename and password.
That's right, it's blank.
Now try it in Opera. What a surprise! That's blank too...
OK, try again. What about Mozilla? Blank again.
Last shot, let's try Dillo. No, that's blank too...
Wait a minute. Why hasn't any other Slashdot reader noticed this already? You can't all be using Internet Exploder, can you?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
just point an ftp at the new site...its all open in one of the directories is a passwd file!!!
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
See, as soon as they switch from FreeBSD to Windows, it goes down. That should tell you something.
What I'd like to know is if they have a way out:
of being trapped by Microsoft solutions.
How the hell am I supposed to view 15 years of legacy MS Office documents and email data if I were to switch to Unix? I'm fucked. I wish I'd realized this when we settled on Microsoft.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
lynx www.wehavethewayout.com
results in...
Alert!: HTTP/1.1 403 Access Forbidden
too bad you can't get IN to the way out. quite amusing--the switch from apache to iis and it takes less than a day for their site to go down. looks like the way out has crashed.
char *mySig;
As of 6:30 PM EST on Tuesday 4/2/02, the site now alternates failures: Blank screens, 403's, directory listing not allowed. I guess if I wanted "the way out" I wouldn't have much luck there, would I?
Speak truth to power.
once they switched to MS it crashed. Here is an article about the whole thing again.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-874132.html
Go Surf.
Wrong.
The Google bar comes with Mozilla and is included with Galeon.
This whole thing reminds me of the time when Microsoft released an annual report which was made on a Mac. The embedded meta-data Word puts in gave them away.
You really didn't think about where you were posting this at all, did you? The entire story was about how Microsoft and Unisys were running their anti-Unix web site on a FreeBSD box. If FreeBSD is "dying", why was it chosen to host the web site in question?
Et tu, Brutus? :-P
Money for nothing, pix for free
Everything has its place. We still use RPG and COBOL where I work. Not because we think they are great languages, but rather because of costs associated with a change-over. So, using that same logic, there are people out there that would prefer to use OS/400 or UNIX over Windows because of long-time familiarity and stability. Hell, we still use Pick and MentorPro in places!
Click here or here.
r7 had this and a few other security issues
... but so is FTP and about a billion other things
you can still brute force passwords tho in r9 (windows) and even the latest Nix servers
Of course VNC is a security issue
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!