News

Anti-Unix Marketing Site Turns Users Away

• By Scott Bekker
• 04/03/2002

Users began reporting Tuesday afternoon that they were having trouble accessing the marketing site, www.wehavethewayout.com, which stands for having an escape from proprietary Unix systems.

Early Wednesday morning the site continued to serve up error messages, such as "You are not authorized to view this page."

The site first gained notoriety on Monday when users discovered that www.wehavethewayout.com, designed to promote the advantages of using Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and the 32-processor Unisys ES7000 server instead of Unix, was actually hosted on a Unix server.

A check of the Web server detection tool at Netcraft revealed the site was hosted on the FreeBSD variant of Unix and the Apache Web server. Both products compete with Microsoft Windows 2000.

The parties switched the server on Tuesday to Windows 2000 and Microsoft's Internet Information Service 5.0, according to the Netcraft tool. After running for five days on FreeBSD and Apache, the site apparently lasted only a few hours on Windows 2000 and IIS 5 before users began experiencing problems.

Unisys and Microsoft have refused to comment on the controversies surrounding the launch of the multi-million-dollar, 18-month marketing campaign. It was not clear early Wednesday whether the site had crashed or if it had been taken down.

Www.wehavethewayout.com carried a Unisys copyright, although Netcraft's tool indicates that Web hosting company NTT/Verio Inc. owns the associated block of IP addresses. Verio hosts many sites running FreeBSD and Apache and also hosts Windows 2000/IIS 5.0 sites. Most public Unisys URLs run Windows NT 4.0 and IIS 4.0.

The marketing site consisted of a registration section and white papers and analyst reports about server consolidation and scalability. From there, users could link directly to a Windows NT 4.0/IIS 4 page within the Unisys domain.