After www.georgewbush.com stepped away from the Akamai content management service on Nov 24, the site enjoyed a short-lived stay on a Windows 2000 server running Microsoft-IIS/5.0, hosted by the Republican National Committee. By Nov 30, the site had been moved to a FreeBSD server running Apache at BUSHCHENEY2004-65-172-163-128-255.

While response times have been improved since moving to FreeBSD, www.georgewbush.com is simply redirecting visitors to the Republican National Committee web site at www.gop.com; however, making an HTTP 1.0 request to www.georgewbush.com causes it to serve the "Test Page for Apache Installation" instead of instructing the browser to redirect to www.gop.com.

www.georgewbush.com continues to block access based on geographical location. A dynamically updating chart of site performance for www.georgewbush.com is available here

Another notable change was observed on Sun Microsystems’ web site at www.sun.com, which was upgraded from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9 on Nov 30. Sun's tardy approach to running the latest version of Solaris on www.sun.com - Solaris 10 was recently released - is in sharp contrast to Microsoft, who ran www.microsoft.com on Windows 2003 for months ahead of its launch.

The LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco is the center of the Linux universe this week, celebrating the best Linux apps and advancing the cause of Linux in business. If you can't be at the Moscone Center, you can read the latest conference news at the LinuxWorld Expo web site, which naturally is powered by ... Windows Server 2003.

Linux enthusiasts are not alone in finding their "World" running on Microsoft software, as the Mac World Expo is also hosted on Windows Server 2003.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.