IIS: Stay or Switch?

eWeek looks at the issue

[cyril kearney]

[eweek.com...]

According to this eWeek article just less than 30% of the servers are running IIS. In my opinion, so large a number makes migration an unrealistic option for the short-term.

In the same isssue is a second article "Cracking Down on Hackers"

[eweek.com...]

[Macguru]

For the short term: no
For finally getting realistic: yes

I will consider trying M$ products after they will be proven safe and efficient.

For the time beeing it is just unbiased common sense to stay out of this mess.

[tedster]

This should help people pay attention:

To see for ourselves how long a default installation of IIS would last in the wild, eWeek Labs connected a fresh install of Windows 2000 Server to the outside Internet. As an arbitrary deadline, we immediately started downloading the network install of Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 and disconnected from the network when it was done.

The 110MB download took 25 minutes. For the first 15 minutes, we didn't see any HTTP traffic at all; in the last 10 minutes of the download, we were infected with Nimda twice—once from two different servers and several times by our own server reinfecting itself.

[tilt]

The 110MB download took 25 minutes. To me, *that's* the scary part of that quote! Talk about bloat-ware.

As far as the server goes, all that says is that the default settings are weak. Doesn't mean the server can't be set up to be more secure. Just to play the devil's advocate for a moment: what would happen with a "default" install of Apache on Red Hat?

One thing I don't like about Microsoft is that they change their story so frequently. Remember when Ole was the be-all and end-all? Then it was Active-X. Then J-script. Now, it's .net and C#. What happened to COM and DCOM? Who knows what it'll be tomorrow. It makes your head spin just trying to keep up. How many different versions of their server exist each with it's own patches?