WinInsider

In the news-from-the-bizarre category comes a bunch of reports that Windows Update is now running on Linux in order to protect the service from the MSBlaster worm. Gosh, that would be such an awesome story if it were true, wouldn't it? Sadly, the truth, as always, is a bit less sensational. A quick visit to Netcraft shows that windowsupdate.microsoft.com is running the curious combination of the Linux OS and the Microsoft IIS Web server, leading to wild speculation. What's happened is that Microsoft has redirected the windowsupdate.com URL to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, as previously reported. Previously, windowsupdate.com was the primary first stop for Windows Update requests and, naturally, it runs some form Windows Server. When Microsoft did the redirect, however, it had to move to a new front-line of defense, so it used its long-time partner Akamai, which runs a caching service that utilizes Linux. As I noted repeatedly, this is exactly the kind of infrastructure server that Linux is perfect for, but the servers aren't owned or run by Microsoft. They just provide a low-level service. And those Linux servers are, of course, simply routing Windows users to Windows Server-based servers that host the Windows Update service. It's worth noting that if MSBlaster had been better written, this solution wouldn't have worked, and the Linux servers would simply have been taken down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. So don't get too excited by the notion that Microsoft is somehow utilizing Linux for better security or whatever. It ain't so: Linux just happens to be what Akamai uses for this type of service.