Office on Linux?
Who woulda thunk it? The new Office 2007 Preview online demo is being served up from an Apache/Linux box!
When I first saw the story on CNET, I tried following the link in the story which took me to a Microsoft site. So far, so good.
The Microsoft site has a nice orange button called "Test Drive Office". Even better: orange is one of my favorite colors, as any Kerika user knows! Clicking on this button takes you to a site that's hosting the online Office preview. Which promptly died, presumably from the unexpectedly large traffic generated by the CNET story, although I can't help thinking that they ought to have expected a high volume of visitors given the publicity they were cranking up around Office Live.
But the way the site died was interesting: it threw a "JAR" error. Wait a minute... a JAR error did you say? That't what you get when a Java program dies! What does that have to do with Office 2007?
Intrigued, I decided to check out the site that's hosting the Office 2007 demo: I looked up "runaware.com" on WhoIs and found that it is operating from Sweden, and is not a Microsoft-owned site after all. Then I used NetCraft to see what the runaware.com site is running and guess what? It's a Linux+Apache environment!
Go figure.
Update June 2007: a number of people responded to this post by asking when Kerika was going to be available on Linux. Well, you can now use Kerika on Windows, Macs and Linux with the same great look-and-feel, and string together a distributed team that spans organizations, platforms and networks.
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posted by Arun Kumar @ 11:39 AM
15 comments
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15 Comments:
Well... pop goes the "nobody uses it" argument against Linux, eh?
I'm not really surprised, Linux is everywhere now. Be interesting to see how long it takes MS to react to this and get their demos hosted on a Windows site. It's an embarassment for them. Probably some good billable hours for WaggEd coming.
But perhaps even more interesting is that this piece appears on the Kerika blog. Kerika looks like a great tool. But we are running Linux at our company, be nice if it was available.
paul@mlug.ca
Kerika does work on Linux; we just don't have a Linux box at hand to create a RPM. Does anyone want to volunteer to create a RPM package if we give them the jars?
The real problem is that they clearly are using citrix a 3rd party terminal services client that has a java applet that will let you remote into a foreign computer and control the desktop.
So... what we really have here is a host that runs linux/apache/java and the java applet connects to a windows machine that runs Office 2007.
:/
~ Anders
Meh, so what. It's not MS hosting it, it's an external company. Same thing happens with downloads hosted by Akamai, as they use *nix for their systems. It's vaguely humourous, but the site itself is (was when I tried it) running on IIS as I got a .NET error. They're probably using a bunch of load balancers running Apache with mod_proxy. Big deal.
Yea.... I doubt microsoft uses linux... This has come up MANY times before. Microsoft uses Akamai, and they use linux for their load balancers, hence why the site comes up as Linux. Check the history of Microsoft's main site, you'll see the same thing.
Arun: you can download vmware's free vmware server, and then install a vmware "appliance" such as fedora 5:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/60
wow, a big company has 3rd party partners. bfd.
Or.. is it embarrassing that Linux and Apache crashed under the stress. Hmmmm, something to think about.
just in case ....
Response Headers - http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007/td
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2006 21:11:47 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF8
200 OK
I remember the early days of MS Chat, they were running a chat server in australia (9msn I believe it was called) - this was a normal IRC server running on FreeBSD. When I pointed this out to them, they promptly changed the serverinfo string to say something like "Microsoft Chat Server" - rubbish! But not surprising if you look at the history of Microsoft and how they have built up their empire by acquiring or stealing other people's ideas!
Response Headers - http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007/td
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 03:24:08 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF8
200 OK
Err but the site says it is running Serve 03 R2
Could that be a honeypot? Microsoft could just be owning several domain, but with its domain name not necessarily be that of Microsoft.
Did you ever get an offer in regards to making a Kerika/Linux rpm? I would like to test it out.
Also, will the server side technology ever be offered to companies? Kerika looks like it would be useful for my company but we can't use any outside application server companies because of security reasons.
Could you post something about these two items on the kerika site? thanks
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