http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28226.html
MS paper touts Unix in Hotmail's Win2k switch By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 21/11/2002 at 11:39 GMT An older MS internal whitepaper from August 2000 on switching Hotmail, which MS acquired in 1997, from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K, reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX, but concludes that the company ought to set the right example by ensuring that each division "should eat its own dogfood." The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server. There are a number of other fascinating documents posted, in which the careful reader will find a veritable treasure map for hacking the citadel, but the one I enjoyed best was the comparison between Win2K and UNIX. Among the observations is a very basic one about security: "A fact about UNIX is that it is easy for an administrator to ensure that there are no irrelevant services running. As well as giving the potential for maximizing performance, it is useful to be sure that there are no random TCP/IP or UDP ports open that could be used as a basis for an attack," the paper notes. Next there's kernel stability: "Both the UNIX kernel, and the design techniques it encourages, are renowned for stability. A system of several thousand servers must run reliably and without intervention to restart failed systems," the author notes, and adds that, "Apache is also designed for stability and correctness, rather than breadth of features or high performance demands." Then of course there's the cost of ownership, which MS insists, against overwhelming contradictory evidence, gives Windows an advantage: "FreeBSD is free. Although there are collateral costs (it's not particularly easy to set up) the freedom from license costs is a major consideration, especially for a startup." <rest of article snipped.> But rememebr the paper's conclusion, each Microsoft division has to "eat it's own dog food." Woof! <g> - JDA
