An older MS internal whitepaper from August 2000 on switching Hotmail, which MS acquired in 1997, from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K, reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX, but concludes that the company ought to set the right example by ensuring that each division "should eat its own dogfood."

The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server. There are a number of other fascinating documents posted, in which the careful reader will find a veritable treasure map for hacking the citadel, but the one I enjoyed best was the comparison between Win2K and UNIX.

For example, TechNet assures us that, "administrators generally find benefit from porting 'cron' jobs to Windows Task Scheduler events. Both Microsoft Interix 2.2 and SFU allow administrators to port 'cron' files to Windows 2000 without any changes in most cases, allowing administrators to gradually transition scheduled events and scripts without impacting operations i.e. at migration scheduled events can still run as 'cron' jobs. After the migration, the 'cron' jobs can be migrated to Windows Task scheduler events. The Windows task scheduler has better integration with event logs."

But the whitepaper had found that, "using FreeBSD, such tasks are scheduled by the cron service. Jobs are scheduled by being listed in a file, one line per job. Changing the file is easy to accomplish using the command line (or rdist), and replacing the entire file is a good way to ensure that each server has exactly the schedule of jobs that the administrator intended. Jobs can be scheduled to execute once, or at intervals down to one minute.

"Although the Windows Task Scheduler service is fundamentally able to look after such jobs, the interfaces provided in Windows does not measure up to the task. The usual interface is the GUI, which is appropriate for setting up jobs on a machine at a time, is labor-intensive and error-prone.

"The command at is deprecated, is not able to schedule repeated jobs at a frequency of less than one day.

"The command jt was offered by the Task Scheduler team, but it is unsupported and awkward to use (it was intended for testing).

"None of the three interfaces offers an easy way to replace the current task schedule entirely. The team met the need by running the cron service provided in Services for UNIX. As described earlier, relying on Services for UNIX (or any other package subject to extra license costs) provides a bad model for other customer deployments."