Showing posts with label windows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label windows. Show all posts

Monday, August 20, 2007

Windows Update Crashed the Skype Network - Can You Believe It?

skype website microsoft

This is unbelievable. Skype is blaming Microsoft "Patch Tuesday" for the downtime and the sign-on problems that lasted for more than 48 hours.

As per Skype, the disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user's computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update. This is presumably the Windows updates that were sent out on Patch Tuesday last week, which required the PC to be restarted.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

It's kind of funny because Skype is using Windows Update as an excuse rather than admitting that they had a bug in their software that was exposed when Microsoft fixed their Windows software. Patch Tuesdays happen every month - how could Skype survive the previous "bulk restarts" on Windows machines. More commentary on Skype Blog, BBC and Neowin.

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Friday, July 06, 2007

Linux Tip: Run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side

WinLinSideBySide.png Adam's guide to running Windows and Mac apps side-by-side left me craving a similar process for Windows apps in Linux. The Venture Cake weblog shows how you can get an effect similar to Coherence for Parallels in Mac using VMware Server and rdesktop in Linux. You need to install Windows as a virtual machine, make a registry hack to remove the Windows desktop, and then connect to the virtual machine using rdesktop. VC touts that the entire process (not including the time it takes to install Windows) takes less than 10 minutes.

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