Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages 186
CWmike writes "Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet paid subscribers were supposed to find the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 RC available for download today. But in a snafu reminiscent of the problems Microsoft had in January when it tried to launch Windows 7 Beta, the download pages for the release candidate were inaccessible, despite numerous attempts over an hour-long span up until about noon Eastern. TechNet and MSDN subscribers were not happy. 'Man, this stinks,' said a user identified as Lyle Pratt, on a TechNet message forum at 10 a.m. ET. 'I can't believe we can still bring MSDN to its knees!' said John Butler, a Microsoft partner. 'Surely, they should be able to deal with this? Not a good advert for Microsoft.' The Windows 7 RC is slated to be available for public download next Tuesday, May 5. Meanwhile, Microsoft said today that the RC would operate until June 2010, for 13 months of free use — a significantly longer time than it did with Vista's previews."
Re:Not thinking (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft are using Akamai. Don't speculate, look at the URL in the Download Manager file that comes from the MSDN site, or look at the connections Download Manager has open during the download.
Re:Commercial torrent is CDN (Score:5, Informative)
Steam uses a CDN, not torrents.
WoW uses bittorrent for the weekly patches though.
Re:Funny way to turn the pirates over to their sid (Score:3, Informative)
Well, when downloading Linux or other FOSS stuff you can check the md5 against the "official" md5 on the project site.
Re:Funny way to turn the pirates over to their sid (Score:4, Informative)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?PV=36:350:DVD:en:x64 [microsoft.com]
SHA1: FC867FE1AB2E0A9796F9E4D155B44EA6998F4874
Re:Torrent? (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though
Microsoft could use their own customized download tool that leverages bittorrent, but does not require publishing a .torrent file to the web or to torrent search engines for use with a non-Microsoft download client. For example the tool could pick up the torrent file from authorized servers only. I think there is really little excuse other than not undermining the anti-piracy FUD engine
Re:Leave it to M$ (Score:3, Informative)
Imbecile. It's common (nay, EXPECTED) in the software industry to use one's own products. It's referred to as "eating your own dog food". Fuck off with the "cool-aid" shit.
Also, the servers would be running on a server class OS. Windows 2008 Server, unless Windows 2010 Server has gone RC recently (it hasn't) - Microsoft actually does tend to use RCs of their own products on their servers, as most software companies do. I assume Apple does the same thing, and it wouldn't surprise me if Canonical updated to RC versions of Ubuntu Server.
Re:Leave it to M$ (Score:2, Informative)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (as the Windows 7 server equivalent is called) has RCd at the same time Windows 7 has.
Re:MD5 Hash please? (Score:3, Informative)
Screen cap from MSDN [imgur.com]
en_windows_7_ultimate_rc_x86_dvd_349010.iso MD5 Hash: 8867c13330f56a93944bcd46dcd73590
en_windows_7_ultimate_rc_x64_dvd_347803.iso MD5 Hash: 98341af35655137966e382c4feaa282d
The x64 leak on mininova [mininova.org] has the same MD5
Re:Commercial torrent is CDN (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, but you can put that under the hood and the user never has to know the details. You give them a normal http link to download an executable "installer" which downloads the rest of the thing using whatever protocol you like. A few years ago most large software companies were doing this to distribute large freely-downloadable stuff. The protocol under the hood obviously wasn't BitTorrent at that time, but the software could do things like resume an interrupted download (which web browsers of the day couldn't do) and was simpler for the user than working with a real ftp client.
However, for someone like Microsoft distributing something like a Windows 7 beta build, you're still going to want to spread the load across multiple servers on multiple continents and so on and so forth, which, yeah, is sort of what services like Akamai are all about. If Microsoft doesn't want to contract out like that, they could probably just do something similar with their own resources. I'm pretty sure they're big enough to be able to handle that.