Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11


From: Georgi Guninski <guninski () guninski com>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 23:07:51 +0300

clearly m$ are involved in this "incident".

i don't want amateurs commenting on m$.

i want an official reply from m$.

is there any official m$ reply on the "incident" (hahahaha) ?

-- 
where do you want bill gates to go today?


On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 02:08:49PM -0500, Todd Towles wrote:
But you just said, there was a patch for the OS. It isn't like some one
month ago patch...this is years and years and years. The company decided
not to patch and to make the tech do a reboot every 30 days. He didn't
do his job, it states it right there.

Does Microsoft have crappy coding in Windows 95? Yep. But can they
really be blamed for a company that decided to not patch?

You are right about the old software, I think every large corporate has
a Windows 95 box running something and one piece of software holds up
the upgrade each year. If this system is that important, it shouldn't
have been maintained so poorly.

-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com
[mailto:full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com] On Behalf Of Michal
Zalewski
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:32 PM
To: ASB
Cc: full-disclosure () lists netsys com
Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat
9/11

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, ASB wrote:

"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to

prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times."

How you managed to read "OS failure" into this is rather astounding...

The statement above, even though either cleverly disguised by the
authorities, or mangled by the press, does ring a bell. It is not about
applications eating up too much memory, hence requiring an occassional
reboot, oh no.

Windows 9x had a problem (fixed by Microsoft, by the way) that caused
them to hang or crash after a jiffie counter in the kernel overflowed:

  http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q216/6/41.asp

It would happen precisely after 49.7 days. Coincidence? Not very likely.
It seems that the system was running on unpatched Windows 95 or 98, and
rather than deploying a patch, they came up with a maintenance procedure
requiring a scheduled reboot every 30 days.

This is one hell of a ridiculous idea, and any attempt to blame a
failure on a technician who failed to reboot the box is really pushing
it.

It is not uncommon for telecommunications, medical, flight control,
banking and other mission-critical applications to run on terribly
ancient software (and with a clause that requires them NOT to be
updated, because the software is not certified against those patches).

In the end, the OS and decision-makers that implemented the system and
established ill-conceived workarounds should split the blame.

/mz

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