Microsoft Is Using Linux To Protect Its Own Web Site

Technology - TechWeb

Thu Aug 21, 3:35 AM ET

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux (news - web sites) is not fit for the enterprise (news - web sites). But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service (news - web sites) attacks.

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According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft's own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.

Akamai runs a service to help boost Web site performance by caching copies of Web sites on many servers in many locations. Akamai can help defend against denial-of-service attacks by spreading the attack among many servers. Just as a distributed denial-of-service attack enlists large numbers of systems to attack a single server, Akamai presents a distributed defense against denial-of-service attacks.

As of this writing, Netcraft reports that www.microsoft.com is still running on Linux, although microsoft.com is reported as running on Windows Server 2003.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company "respects the fact that [its partners and vendors] may have diversified business models and operate in mixed IT environments. Microsoft's main concern is doing whatever it takes to help ensure customers can get to the Blaster worm patch to protect their computers.... Microsoft is using Akamai's extensive worldwide network to distrubte the massive traffic that is illegally being directed at Microsoft by hackers."

The Blaster worm, which struck the Internet last week, was set with a payload designed to trigger this past Saturday and flood the address windowsupdate.com with a massive denial-of-service attack. But windowsupdate.com never was a Microsoft site, it was an incorrect address for picking up Windows updates. Until Saturday, Microsoft had set windowsupdate.com to redirect to windowsupdate.microsoft.com; Microsoft protected itself last week by switching off that redirection.

An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment, except to confirm that Microsoft is a customer.

Microsoft using a Linux service is ironic, given that Microsoft has identified Linux as its biggest competitor. In a conference call with analysts last month, company CFO John Connors ranked Linux as the #2 risk faced by the company. The #1 risk was the general economic environment, Connors said. Nearly one in five small and mid-sized businesses are using Linux on the desktop.

In tomorrow's news: McDonald's executive found eating at Burger King.

Introduction

There are two steps to burning a data CD-ROM. You need to create an ISO image with the mkisofs command and then burn the ISO image to the CD-ROM with the cdrecord command. The steps for burning a CD-R or a CD-RW are the same, except that if the CD-RW already has data on it, the CD-RW must be blanked before re-writing data to it...

Creating the ISO Image

Before you can burn a data CD-ROM, you have to create an ISO image of all the files that you want on the CD. The ISO images can not be larger than the size of the CD. Copy all the files that you want on the CD in a directory (files_dir in this example). Then run the following command the create the ISO image:

mkisofs -A "application id" -V "volume id" -J -R -v -T -x ./lost+found -o name.iso files_dir

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WHEN PIGS FLY!!!

Introduction

Creating the ISO Image