It is to laugh! Not an April Fools joke
 

It pains me to have to say this, but since it's today: the following is not April Fools' related. But if this message appeared on Slashdot today, you would assume that it was...

news.com is reporting that Unisys and Microsoft are going together on an anti-Unix campaign, largely directed at Sun, that claims that Unix is expensive and difficult. And in putting together the campaign, Unisys has created a website: wehavethewayout.com

And when you go to Netcraft's "What's that site running? page" , and enter the URL for the Unisys campaign web site, you find that it's running on... yes, you guessed it, Unix. OK, FreeBSD. The complete string of what they're running is "Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD". This is accurate because it's something returned by the server of the site itself; basically, there's a way to ask a web server what it's running, and most of the time, it will tell you, if you ask right.

That's the bulk of the news.com story. I took it a step further. I went to the damn site itself - www.wehavethewayout.com - and noticed that they have a "Join the eCommunity" link. OK, I'm game for a new community. I click on the link and it opens a new window. That window is blank. The site is not responding. Hmmm.

A few minutes later, it DOES respond. So I go back to Netcraft to ask: what is "ecommunity.unisys.com" running? That being the URL of their little link.

Yes, the site that was failing to respond was running: "Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98".

It is to laugh.

Shortly afterward, the whole site was moved to Windows.

At which point it stopped responding at all.

Whee.

Interesting.....
 

That site probably has had more hack attempts in the past week than Win2000Test (the Microsoft Test Windows 2000 Server) did when Microsoft announced it :).

Still, it is to laugh at Unisys for screwing this one up. They seem to repel anyone with half a brain these days, from what I'm hearing from ex-Unisys guys (and I did have one working with us from their SAN group, among others).

And if I had to pay for a Microsoft site, why would I pay Unisys? Especially when Dell is kicking their ass left and right with everything, and they don't have to put up badly worded hate speech against UNIX to do it.

Besides, if I'm going to spend $2 million on a server, it's not going to be on one server unless it's an IBM zSeries. $2 million buys you a few Sun Fire or IBM RS/6000 boxes and the needed redundancy that any CIO is going to ask for, since $2 million = It Better Be Up 24/7 or someone gets axed.

Somehow I don't think that even Windows 2000 or .NET datacenter server can do that :). At all of our clients (and no, we don't tell everyone who all of them are), when you cross a certain threshold, you're in z/OS, VMS, AIX or Solaris territory for databases or other apps that need a $2 million server.

Notice I didn't mention Tru64 or HP-(s)UX. I'm seeing less and less of them in data centers, and Compaq + HP = Disaster.

Mitch

Re: It is to laugh! Not an April Fools joke
 

You may have caught the community site shortly after MS found out (by reading the article at The Register, no doubt) that the Unisys site was running Java Server Pages. :-) The Register article also notes that the new Windows server responds on a portscan at 3306, suggesting that while the pages have been moved to a new server, the underlying server-side code is probably still talking to MySQL or PostgreSQL rather than MS SQLServer.

I was playing with ms advanced server the other day, its unstable as hell.

:zzz: