White House Web site moves to Linux
The White House Web site has been moved onto a Linux platform
after its administrators managed to successfully side step an attack
by the Code Red worm.
Netcraft reports that Whitehouse.gov is now being hosted by a
peering firm and that the site uses a Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 Web
server on a Linux platform.
Prior to its forced move, Netcraft suggests the site was run on a Sun
server, and the site still may be, since Netcraft's data on this is far
from conclusive (as explained in Netcraft's FAQ).
As previously reported, one of the main features of the Code Red
worm, which targets vulnerabilities in Microsoft IIS Web servers, was
to attempt to flood the White House Web site via a co-ordinated
distributed denial of service attack.
The attack failed because it was against a specific IP address, and
not a URL, and the worm would check for a valid connection before
launching an attack. By moving from one IP address to another,
Whitehouse.gov successfully avoided the attack.
The move onto Linux is interesting but should be seen as the
incidental consequence of moving the site so that it is hosted by a
peering firm, not a ringing presidential endorsement of the open
source operating system. When Microsoft got its Domain Name
System (DNS) servers in a twist earlier this year it partially
outsourced their management to Akamai, which used Linux servers
for the job - much to the embarrassment of Redmond.
