Even Microsoft Doesn't Use Windows?

[Remote_Access_]

This is an interesting article. It was taken from Here

Microsoft's competitor Oracle has claimed that the software giant doesn't even use Windows servers to host their own web sites.
"Microsoft doesn't even use NT on their own Web site. They use Unix. It's rather ironic," said Oracle's senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Oracle has recently begun a marketing campaign promoting their own servers as "unbreakable."
Microsoft angrily denied Oracle's accusation as untrue, saying that they have only one website which don't use Windows 2000 and Windows.Net Server - the Hotmail free email service, which is being transitioned over to Microsoft software

More info here

Remote_Access_

[Shmoo]

I did several scans of www.Microsoft.com and all of them said that the server was 'Microsoft-IIS/5.0'.

[Remote_Access_]

More info here

[larryjs]

All MS web servers ARE MS based(hotmail included).HOWEVER the employee data base is oracle running on sco unix. I guess they figured that employee's will be to familar with MS and they want to discourage fraud

[shkuey]

Originally posted by larryjs
All MS web servers ARE MS based(hotmail included).HOWEVER the employee data base is oracle running on sco unix. I guess they figured that employee's will be to familar with MS and they want to discourage fraud

Hotmail is hosted on unix, because, as far as I know, microsoft has yet to migrate it since it's purchase three or four years ago.

[souleman]

Oracle likes to talk crap about other companies. They talk about how IBM used oracle when they were doing some test program instead of DB2. IBM said a head of time that the reason they were using Oracle was that it had the greatest market share, and they wanted to have benchmarks that would compare to the most endusers.

From what I have seen, Microsoft is using all MS products. This is quite unfortunate though. Hotmail was decent back when it was run on FreeBSD servers, but since Microsoft took over.....

What probably happened was that oracle found out about one or two servers that Microsoft is running for testing or something. Then they publish this to everyoe.

[larryjs]

Originally posted by shkuey


Hotmail is hosted on unix, because, as far as I know, microsoft has yet to migrate it since it's purchase three or four years ago.

Are you sure ?I was told it has been migrated already

[petemcevoy]

Not according to the register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.html

[larryjs]

"A check with Netcraft shows that Hotmail's front edge servers do indeed run Windows 2000, so Microsoft can faithfully claim that the "web site runs Windows",
as it did yesterday. But the infrastructure is still stored on BSD kit. How much we're not sure, but when we receive hard numbers, we'll tell you. "

I guess this is why I told it has been migrated

[chsh]

Well gee, let's just look and see:

[chsh@comp chsh]$ webid www.microsoft.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
[chsh@comp chsh]$ webid www.hotmail.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
[chsh@comp chsh]$ webid www.passport.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
[chsh@comp chsh]$ webid www.msn.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
[chsh@comp chsh]$ webid lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0


Webid contains:

#!/bin/sh

echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" | nc $1 80 | grep "Server: "

lc1.law5.hotmail.passport.com is where hotmail.com forwards me to (maybe not everyone).

At any rate, the webservers say they're IIS 5.

Nmap's -O option failed on www.microsoft.com. A manual fingerprinting attempt provided results that would suggest they are blackholing any and all unwanted connection attempts.

Hotmail has been, to my knowledge, almost completely converted to Win2k (I'm talking about the web interface stuff itself -- large portions of the remaining infrastructure are sitting on FreeBSD still).

Microsoft could be just forging Apache headers on hotmail, but I doubt they'd go to the trouble, especially when it's public knowledge that they haven't been successful in migrating from FreeBSD.