Did not ever expect to see such headlines in 2008. But then, one would not expect to see sites running on windows and doing ecommerce as well in 2008. Not really wanting to say “why am I not surprised”, the Singapore F1 race site selling tickets keeled over when online sales were launched on Feb 14 2008. Clicking through their site to buy tickets, brings one to websales.gtn.com.sg. A quick check with both nmap and netcraft says that they are running, yes, you guessed it, windows server 2003. Sigh. Some people take time to learn and then the crash and burn.
The exciting thing here is that Singapore FI site runs on Fedora!, which for some reason, the wisdom was lost when it came to hiring a online ticket sales provider!
Will the online ticket sales service provider please contact me to solve the problem? I can deploy RHEL on a bunch of virtual machines and take care of the problem in a hurry!
Haha. I totally agree with you here 🙂
I tried to call them and get tickets and they called me back twice — once to confirm my order and tell me their systems were still “down” and once to actually go through and collect my details and process the order. The online system was un-usable that day.
Oh and I got the confirmation/booking call in the evening around 1745 IIRC. Bookings opened at 0900 in the morning 😉
Hi Harish,
This is Yuit from The Adventus.
I totally agree with you. A few of us NDP sponsors were actually talking about how bad their situation is… if only they had approached the NDP team (running on Linux boxes), having experienced this many times since 2003!!!
Yuit, would you be able to approach these people and help them out? They are obviously struggling and my guess is that some “MS” folks are busily trying to help them out so that they can then say “see, sales of F1 tickets were transacted on a windows machine!”.