Leave MS out of the game [LWN.net]

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 23, 2007 11:57 UTC (Thu) by sstein (subscriber, #15028)
Parent article: The Skype outage

Folks, do me a favor. Leave Microsoft out of this. It was a bug in Skype's software and has nothing to do with the large number of Windows installations and their reboots. You might argue that this wouldn't happen if Skype was open source but blaming Microsoft for it is just stupid.

Regards,

Sebastian

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Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 24, 2007 7:12 UTC (Fri) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Windows Updates causing reboots is the official theory from Skype, it's not made up by LWN.net. I thought the article was quite straightforward in conveying that.

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 24, 2007 8:32 UTC (Fri) by sstein (subscriber, #15028) [Link]

Skype officially said it was not Microsoft's fault:

http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/the_microsoft_connecti...

Drawing conclusions from the Skype outage like it wouldn't have happened if the world was not running Windows is just ridiculous and a very poor argument.

Sorry, but I'm a longterm LWN reader, but the conclusions drawn in this article are just crap.

Anyway, if you are convinced that Microsoft is responsible for everything bad happening in the world, I will not try to change your mind.

Sebastian

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 24, 2007 14:00 UTC (Fri) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> Drawing conclusions from the Skype outage like it wouldn't have happened if the world was not running Windows is just ridiculous and a very poor argument.

and, unless i am missing something, one not made by the article. i just reread it because that certainly was not my intent and i just don't see where the article says that, or anything like it. Skype went down because of a bug in their software, at least according to them, that was *triggered* by the reboots.

i have my, relatively unfavorable, opinions of Microsoft, but i try hard *not* to attribute to them things that aren't their fault.

the only word that might be seen as an indictment of Microsoft would seem to be "monocultural" ... even that isn't their fault, though they have worked hard to make it true.

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 24, 2007 14:33 UTC (Fri) by sstein (subscriber, #15028) [Link]

> the only word that might be seen as an indictment of Microsoft would seem to be "monocultural" ... even that isn't their fault, though they have worked hard to make it true.

Well, you implicitly refer in the following sentence to MS:

> It does, however, give one pause about the power of the near-monoculture in desktop operating systems.

The paragraph below this sentence explains why this couldn't happen to Linux, so you contrast Linux to near-monoculture. The problem is not the monoculture but that MS is using a fixed regular date for updates. So if Ubuntu decides to introduce also a regular update cycle, it could cause the same problem. It is not a problem related to MS.

Sebastian

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Aug 30, 2007 12:22 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

To take your scenario of 'Ubuntu introducing a regular update cycle', here's why it would not have the same effect:

1. The vast majority of Ubuntu updates don't require a system reboot (only kernel/driver updates)

2. In the absence of reboots, and assuming an always-on Skype client, only a Skype client update could cause a mass of Skype nodes to disappear and re-connect.

So even if Ubuntu or some other distro became a monoculture as popular as Windows and went for regular update cycles (rather than its current day-by-day updates), it wouldn't have the same effect on the population of connected Skype clients.

It's not fair to blame Microsoft for this outage, but it is reasonable to point out that the monthly reboot cycle due to Windows Update is a factor in stepping on this Skype bug, and that even a monoculture of a single Linux distro would not have had the same impact.

Leave MS out of the game

Posted Sep 6, 2007 16:39 UTC (Thu) by sstein (subscriber, #15028) [Link]

Again, the outage was forced by restarting the Skype client and not rebooting Windows. If all Skype users were using Linux, the same would have happened. It is not related to Windows at all.

Sebastian