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  1. www.sco.com is a weapon of mass destruction

    Much of the commentary on the SCO distributed denial of service scenario, including our own, has been based on the premise that SCO badly wants to keep their web site running. This may not be the case: unlike Microsoft, which has a real business to run and a real need to keep its web site operational, SCO Executives may not strongly care about the availability of www.sco.com. After all, Michael Doyle’s half a billion dollar patent win against Microsoft scarcely hinged on the response times of the Eolas web site.

    In fact, the author of the MyDoom virus has delegated control of the most enormous volume of http traffic that the Internet has yet seen to hostmaster@sco.com. On a whim, SCO can direct that Tsunami at an object of their choosing, simply by changing an A record in named.conf in time for the change to propagate by Sunday.

    In this context, SCO Executives may have latitude to consider alternative defenses which do not involve having to parlay with low-down-no-good-Linux-loving-CDN-providers.

    (more...)

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 30th January, 2004 in Dogfood

  2. American Express adopts Linux

    www.americanexpress.com migrated from AIX to Linux last week, mirroring a similar move by another financial giant, Schwab.com earlier in the year.

    IBM has a significant presence with both organisations, and it has probably had a role in encouraging both organisations transititions to Linux.

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 27th October, 2003 in Dogfood

  3. Linux encroaching further into sun.com

    Ever since shortly after Sun's acquisition of Cobalt three years ago, some sun.com sites have run Linux. However, more recently, Linux is being used for Sun sites that appear unconnected with the Cobalt product range. Sun sites running on Linux include supportforum.sun.com, and srsnetconnect.sun.com.

    The netblock listings indicate that all of these sites are outsourced by Sun, and it may be the case that the more the company outsources, the harder it is to avoid their sites running on Linux rather than Solaris.

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 26th October, 2003 in Dogfood

  4. 3rd Sunday in the month is Reboot Sunday at Nortel

    One of the more eyecatching uptime graphs is at Nortel Networks, where over the last two years www.nortelnetworks.com has been rebooted at 13:04 GMT [14:04 in the winter] on Sundays falling between the 15th and 21st of the month producing the following graph.

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 26th October, 2003 in Dogfood

  5. Windows 2000 site runs for two years without reboot

    www.baltimore.com has run for two years since its last reboot, and has the longest time since reboot of any Windows 2000 site we find on the Internet.

    Baltimore was an early evangelist of enterprise Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and briefly a FTSE-100 company during 2000. Although its business has considerably reduced in size, the www.baltimore.com site, which Alexa ranks in the busiest 50,000 sites on the internet, will have seen a considerable volume of traffic since it was last rebooted.

    (more...)

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 22nd October, 2003 in Dogfood

  6. Is the SCO site down again?

    The SCO site has been up during business hours in Utah, but has since failed again. Many news sites carried the story that Eric Raymond had spoken to agroup responsible for a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the www.sco.com site and that they agreed to stop. However it appears that this may have been a hoax, or they subsequently changed their minds, or another person decided to continue the attack, or that the timeout on the attack has not yet been reached.

    In a similar situation 10 days ago Microsoft chose to deploy Akamai's caching service, which has successfully averted any outages.

    failed requests at www.microsoft.com

    Akamai would be more dependable at warding off Distributed Denial of Service attacks than favours from Eric Raymond, but concievably SCO may have difficulty swallowing its pride and buying a service that uses tens of thousands of Linux servers, for which Akamai presumably has not purchased a SCO licence.

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 26th August, 2003 in Dogfood

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