Thursday, July 17, 2003

8,000 sites change from Linux to Windows Server 2003 From the NetCraft survey: In the three months since the launch the number of active sites has increased by over 300% and now stands at 88,400.Over the past 3 months many new hosting providers have released Windows Server 2003 hosting packages. Myhosting.com is now the top hoster of active Windows Server 2003 sites, and apparently has stopped offering Windows Server 2000 and Microsoft-IIS/5.0 to new customers, inisisting that they should run Microsoft-IIS/6.0. Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems. That's 8,000 sites switching from Linux.  Now that is some news. 6:37:48 PM    comment []

J2EE or .NET? Recent ANALYST QUOTES found in the press (provided by the RD Program):  §          “Linux does not scale as well as Windows today. And when you take that into account, I’m not sure we really see such big differences in performance or robustness between Windows 2000 and Linux.” – Phil Dawson of META Group as quoted in MIS, April 30, 2003 §          "For the NT base, Windows Server 2003 is a really big improvement. It's four times less likely to have failure than NT. Also, new hardware won't run NT." – Tom Bittman of Gartner as quoted in E-Commerce Times, April 25, 2003 §          "This platform (Windows Server 2003) represents a sharp improvement in quality, reliability and security for Microsoft." – Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group as quoted in vunet.com, April 24, 2003 §          "The company (Microsoft) has a tremendous ability to build tools for application development and is the best at helping developers build easy-to-use applications quickly." -- Ted Schadler of Forrester Research as quoted in NewsFactor Network, June 2, 2003 §          "IT incurs much more support costs (with Linux) and downtime. The savings are chewed up in support costs." – Rob Enderle of Giga Information Gropu as quoted in NewsFactor Network, June 10, 2003 §          "I don't want to say that Microsoft has the holy grail here, but they are making development much simpler and faster. Their functionality is strong, and it'll be even stronger in a couple of years." – Ted Schadler of Forrester Research as quoted in the Chicago Tribune, March 28, 2003 §          "The .NET platform makes developing XML Web services far easier and faster than previous technologies. Microsoft has been able to convince many early adopters of Web services to use the .NET platform -- even those companies that may have had strategic commitments to J2EE." – Uttam Narsu of Giga Information Group as quoted in NewsFactor Network, April 24, 2003 §          "Microsoft has an understanding of how to make a product easy to use." -- Kevin Scott of AMR Research as quoted in CFO Magazine, March 25, 2003 5:03:41 PM    comment []

Critical DCOM Security Flaw Microsoft has released Security Bulletin MS03-026 which indicates that the first "critical" level problem has been found in Windows Server 2003 (although other issues have been found after the release).  Also of concern, the problem exists on NT4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.  Here is an explanation from KB 823980 which also includes links to the patches for each affected platform: There is a vulnerability in the part of RPC that deals with message exchange over TCP/IP. The failure results because of incorrect handling of malformed messages. This particular vulnerability affects a distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) interface with RPC, which listens on TCP/IP port 135. This interface handles DCOM object activation requests that are sent by client computers (such as Universal Naming Convention [UNC] paths) to the server.  To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would have to send a specially formed request to the remote computer on port 135. Workarounds include disabling port 135 at your firewall, disabling DCOM all together, or for XP enabling the Internet Connection Firewall.  But the patch is the only way to cure the O/S flaw. While software developers may not worry about this patch, COM based applications possibly will be affected.  This is due to the patches replacing the core OLE Automation DLL's that COM/DCOM is based on (ole32.dll, rpcrt4.dll, rpcss.dll). EWEEK: Critical Flaw Leaves Windows Server 2003 Vulnerable http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1195713,00.asp   1:29:57 PM    comment []

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