The Hindu : Microsoft falls back on Linux

Preamble : This preamble is not part of the original story reproduced below. The story appears in India's largest and most respected national newspaper THE HINDU dated 24 Auugst 2003. And, was downloaded from the w-w-web at URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/08/24/stories/2003082403361000 .htm .

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 24, 2003

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Microsoft falls back on Linux

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM AUG. 23. Reports that the Microsoft Corporation had to fall back on systems using Linux to protect its Web sites from attack have revved up Linux enthusiasts and evangelists here.

During the past week, the Microsoft has been using the services of Akamai as defence against distributed denial of service attacks by viruses and worms that targeted Microsoft sites. Akamai provides an Internet-wide caching system that helps to spread the attack among many servers that cache the Microsoft site, www.microsoft.com. Akamai uses Linux Operating System for its servers.

The Coordinator of the Thiruvananthapuram Linux User's Group (LUG), S. Rajkumar, said that the Microsoft would now have to swallow its claim that the Linux was not fit for enterprise use.

"Its dependence on the Akamai service shows that the company could neither persuade Akamai to use the Windows Operating System nor find an alternative caching service that used Windows system.'' Many Web forums such as Slashdot are discussing the irony of the www.microsoft.com site running Linux. It was Netcraft.com, a company specialising on research and analysis of Internet, that first reported that Microsoft was using the services of Akamai.

A note posted at its Web site said that Microsoft changed its DNS (Domain Name System) last Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolved to machines on Microsoft's own network, but instead were handled by the Akamai caching system. The site also provided data relating to the past week.

Just as denial of service attacks funnels traffic from many different points to a single destination, Akamai's DNS servers multiplex requests to the nearest point to each attacking machine in its global caching system.

This not only diminishes the effect of attack on servers but also reduces traffic across networks by localising it.

At the same time, microsoft.com (without the www) is running from Microsoft's own network using Windows 2003 server.

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