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To: Squantos
Back in the late 1990s, HP's HP-UX operating system as well as Sun Microsystem's SunOS and I "think" Solaris had extensions for compliance to DoD "Orange Book" C-2 specifications.

We ran it on the HP machines, but not on the Sun servers. I can't remember why. Anyway...management over us sent a MS NT server running on 64bit DEC Alpha hardware for us to test in a semi-production environment to support DNS. The place where I was working had some very busy DNS servers....to the tune of 52 queries per second during peak traffic times.

The documentation that came with the DEC said that MS NT adhered to Orange Book C-2. We had a little trouble believing it so we started asking questions. Eventually, we found the evaluators within the organization who made this claim. Oh SURE...it was C-2 allright....IF you locked the damned thing in a concrete bunker not connected to any network at all, and IF you posted an armed guard outside the bunker to protect it and IF you left it powered down. I kid you not. In more words than that the evaluation stated that you literally had to turn it off, lock it up, and guard it in order comply with C-2.

We called the evaluator and as it turns out they were pressured from above...and those up above were making big deals with Microsoft. You know where I was when this all happened. :-)

...and with that, here's a graphic that doesn't quite adequately express my contempt for Microsoft...but it's a good start! :-)

Windows Sucks More!


31 posted on 05/29/2009 8:20:56 AM PDT by hiredhand (Understand the CRA and why we're facing economic collapse - see my about page.)
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To: Squantos
I forgot to tell you what actually happened to the DEC. We did put it on-line as a DNS server as requested. We did this early in the day in the central time zone here in the U.S. As peak traffic time approached, it started buffering DNS queries because it couldn't keep up. Then because it was taking so long on account of being overloaded, clients started timing out. The VERY first time one of our "customers" called, we yanked that bad boy off line and put back the Linux box which it momentarily replaced.

In summary, it failed miserably. We put a copy of RedHat Linux on it for the 64 Bit Alpha architecture and BIND and it kept up WONDERFULLY. We included this all in our report to the knuckleheads who had us test it. They had us box it up, send it back and we never heard anymore about it. :-)
32 posted on 05/29/2009 8:28:00 AM PDT by hiredhand (Understand the CRA and why we're facing economic collapse - see my about page.)
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