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Bruno, long time ago

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Thu, 19 Jun 2003 Continental Airlines expert about dopesmoking penguins

smoking penguin - (C) Andy Martello Do you remember the January SQL slammer worm? One of the consequences of this worm was that Continental Airlines had to cancel flights, because their admins failed to protect their systems.

But, on Tech Web, Nathan Hanks, managing director at Continental Airlines, said:

All the guys hacking Windows are Linux guys. Continental was hit hard by SQL Slammer and our CEO said we'd failed.

[...]

Having one vendor throat to choke is helpful in crisis situations. An IT pro can't go to the CEO and say that a server is down, "and hopefully some guy in Amsterdam" will get to a fix when he gets back from the "dope house".

He also said that he was impressed with Microsoft's response to the problems.

These sayings brought of course a lot of reactions.

The guy who miserably failed to protect his systems, and caused Continental problems is a funny one: He defends his own technical choices by the fact that Linux developers are all dopesmokers!
What is sure, is that these dopesmokers could not do a lot for him, if he went to change his systems for Linux ones: Maybe he would need to wait a couple of hours for answers (when the dope effect is over!), but, as in that case he forgot to install a patch available 6 months before the worm, this delay would not matter anyway ;-)

Just for the fun, Continental problems maybe started the day Nathan Hanks asked people how to successfully install SQL Server. He eventually got a very responsive answer, two days later, by a Microsoft guy ;-)

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