[olug] PayPal outage

[William Haisch]

According to netcraft.com:

"Paypal began experiencing performance problems Friday after a redesign 
and code revision destabilized its site performance. Company press reps 
have said that while eBay's infrastructure allows site changes to be 
rolled back, Paypal's does not. Paypal is powered by an Apache web 
server on Linux, while eBay runs on Windows Server 2003."

Just wait:  in a month, all the trade rags will say Windows rules and 
Linux is not enterprise ready because of this outage at PayPal.  So 
this begs the question:  When running Linux and Apache in an enterprise 
environment, is it true that changes on Linux can't be rolled back or 
reversed?  Is this a matter of planning and setup or a true limitation 
of the platform?  Does this mean that PayPal doesn't know what its 
doing?  Should I trust them with my money?

P.S.  Listened to the interview of attorney David Boies today on NPR.  
He busted Microsoft lying during its anti-trust case with the 
government.  They [MS] had spliced together different, similar looking 
desktop videos to trying to show that Windows, IE, and Office work best 
together and would not work if they were separated.  Some researchers 
from Stanford took screen shots of the video and saw that some programs 
came and went magically.  Its a good listen.  This begs the question:  
should I trust my data with a shady company that lies to its customers?

-Wm.
William Haisch
bill at whaisch.com