used by Cobalt, and has the best established retail channels in
English speaking countries. If there is to be an impact on Red Hat's
share of the Web, it may be the case that the volunteer Debian
distribution is the most likely to gain in popularity and credibility,
rather than the other commercial distributions.
Dogfood
Throughout most of the last year Apple has run [2]www.apple.com in a
load balanced configuration consisting of a mixture of Solaris servers
and Apple's own MacOS X. Until recently most of the requests have been
served from the Solaris machines, but www.apple.com now seems to be
running exclusively Apple's own operating system. Solaris is still run
on quite a number of Apple's other [3]sites, however.
Compaq has also switched to running its own operating system on its
signature site. [4]www.compaq.com has switched to Apache on Compaq
Tru 64 Unix. Compaq has run NT and Microsoft-IIS since 1996, but may
feel that it is important to make a statement about Tru 64 Unix, in
the wake of its most visible reference site, amazon.com switching to
[5]Linux. Compaq seems to be using Tru 64/Apache as a reverse proxy
in front of its existing deployment of NT machines, as the sites
content is still produced using Microsoft technology.
Another site being queried extensively at the moment is
[6]www.walmart.com. This initially looks like a Microsoft-IIS server
behind a Linux based reverse proxy. However, there has been strong
speculation that Walmart is actually running Apache natively with the
server signature hand edited to say "Microsoft-IIS/5.0". This seems
quite possible, as on one day the server signature was reported as
Microsoft-IIS/4.0 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.6.6 OpenSSL/0.9.5, and the site
also offers the JServSessionId cookie commonly used by Apache JServ.
References
1. http://x58.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=705169495.1&mhitnum=1&CONTEXT=976973433.7
2. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.apple.com
3. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/hosted?netname=APPLE-WWNET,17.0.0.0,17.255.255.255&order=max
4. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.compaq.com
5. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.amazon.com
6. http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.walmart.com
