but….

I would like to ask technical experts the following question:
Why they (Skype people) don’t run their network on UNIX/LINUX machines ?

Based on my 15 years of experience managing a UNIX/LUNUX network, I can say that
there is no need to re-boot UNIX/LINUX server after applying any kind of patches.
You simply re-start certain service (including network service).
This feature is built-in every UNIX/LINUX version.

There is ONLY one case when the UNIX/LINUX server needs to be re-booted.
This is the case when the KERNEL is replaced with the newer-one or in the case of hardware failure.
ALL other changes (patches) to the server can be done 100% transparent for users.

Ask yourself why GOOGLE, Wall Street, international financial institutes etc etc run their business on UNIX/LINUX?

To give some more detail, we were contacted by Skype about this last week and have worked to help them. First, we checked to see if there were any issues introduced by the security updates that could have caused the situation, and we found that there were no issues introduced by the security updates themselves.

Next, we checked with our Microsoft/Windows Update teams to see if there was anything unusual in this month’s update in terms of reboots, size of the updates or speed of distributing the updates through Automatic Update. We confirmed that there is nothing unusual in this month’s release that could have contributed to this situation. From a release point of view, this month’s release followed our usual format and processes.

Fortunately, Skype has identified the cause. As Villu Arak notes, “a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm” was the cause, and they have corrected it.

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2007/08/20/questions-about-last- tuesday-s-release-and-skype.aspx

http://gigaom.com/2007/08/16/skype-groans-sipphone-gains/#comment-4561 34
http://gigaom.com/2007/08/16/skype-groans-sipphone-gains/#comment-4587 53

It’s interesting though, that the more we rely on these services, the more frustrated we get when they don’t meet our expectations.

Depending on the user, some will opt for web searches to find solutions, whilst others will just give up.

Just imagine if the whole network behind MSN Messenger went down worldwide.

As you probably know, Skype went down on Thursday and didn’t resume to normal until sometime Saturday…….

That said, you’d think that even if it acted like one big Denial of Service attack that Skype would shut down their links and then gracefully bring people back onto their network, rather than collapse for 48 hours.