Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 02:36:02 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Bob Hall" <rjhalljr@starpower.net>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: hotmail question Message-ID: <00c701c141b7$a99f6220$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010919220208.A400@starpower.net>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Bob Hall >Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 7:02 PM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: hotmail question > > >On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 07:51:38PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote: >> On Saturday 15 September 2001 16:46, Oscar Castaneda wrote: >> > does any body know if hotmail works based on freebsd? if so what version >> > might they use? >> > >> > in my perception, if it does run on freebsd, it goes to show how >stable and >> > robust an os it is, under the heavy load i suspect they handle. >> >> If memory serves ... >> Prior to M$ buying hotmail, the service was running on a >combination of FreeBSD >> and Solaris w/ qmail. When M$ bought them, they tried to convert >things to NT 4. > >If you google for 'hotmail' and 'freebsd', you'll find a zdnet article >from June 18 about MS admitting that they are still using FreeBSD for >DNS hosting. Apparently, the MS engineers evaluated the load on those >machines and never even tried to put W2K on them. > >Also, Ted Mittelstaedt claims in his book that Hotmail is still using >Sun for its backend servers. I know absolutely nothing about running a >web mail site, so I don't know what the backend servers do. > handle the mail exchanging. Keep in mind that this part of the book was written a year ago, Microsoft could have changed it by now. However, I don't belive that they have. If you Telnet into the SMTP port on any of Hotmails mailservers, you most definitely do NOT get a Microsoft Exchange banner, unless they have totally modified the SMTP banner. (which I fail to see the point of why they would do this) One characteristic of Sendmail's banners is that they issue the time and date as part of the greeting. I don't know if qmail does also, but I don't see why they wouldn't. Microsoft Exchange does not. The Hotmail SMTP servers definitely do. One big problem with e-mail espically of that magnitude is that if you do it the traditional UNIX way, you have lots and lots and lots of tiny files in the spool directory. UNIX's answer has been to hash the spool up with a bunch of subdirectories. I'm not sure that the NTFS filesystem is up to this. >This was all an open secret prior to MS's confession. Ted describes >Hotmail's set up in his book, which was originally printed in December >2000. > Actually, there wasn't anything really secret about it. Microsoft had a number of job requisitions posted on their website right after the takeover that were asking for people with FreeBSD experience, espically experience in scripting for FreeBSD, and they mentioned that the job would be for Hotmail. Also, pre takeover, the Hotmail people did say what they were running on. I would suspect that after Microsoft took over Hotmail, and their marketing people start asking the networking engineers at Hotmail if they could use Windows, that all of the FreeBSD guru's at Hotmail started looking for other jobs. I would suspect that within 6 months of the Microsoft acquisition, that Microsoft was in a real bind, and pretty much had no choice but to swing over to Windows. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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