Article on SUNW in the November 13 issue of Forbes. Some excerpts:
Sun Microsystems' servers have been crashing for more than a year. Sun has kept the flaw secret- and hasn't fixed it yet.
The mysterious glitch has been popping up since late last year. At a new web company in San Francisco, a telecommunications company in the Midwest, a Baby Bell in Atlanta, an Internet domain registry on the east Coast-for no apparent reason, high end servers made by Sun Microsystems suddenly crashed.
It happens not to all of them, and not all the time, but enough to cause problems for America Online, Ebay and dozens of other major corporate accounts, baffling Sun engineers who spent months trying to identify the problem.
Adding to the mystery is Sun's own reticence. It has never issued a warning to customers or disclosed the flaw to new buyers. For months Sun told customers seeking a repair that they must sign a legal agreement promising to keep it secret. Many still don't dare speak out. Even now Sun hasn't published on its main web site an official explanation of the bug.
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Last November Verisign Global Registry Services, a domain name registry, was down for two hours after a crucial Sun box crashed. Verisign complained but got no explanation. Months later an executive at Verisign ran across the Gartner bulletin(relating to Sun problems)
"I said to Sun, My God, you knew about this problem, and you didn't tell me? That's unconscionable," he says. Verisign still uses Sun for some tasks but has moved important systems onto IBM Unix servers.
<snip>
News of the glitch, which has spread to online forums, has set other Sun clients on edge. "We're all living in fear of this," says a webmaster at a dot-com that uses Sun.
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And McSquealy has the audacity to lambaste Bill Gates and MSFT? What a joke! |
