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Windows 2000 Passes 1 Million IP Addresses

Web researchers at Netcraft Ltd. say Windows 2000 crossed the threshold of 1 million IP addresses in March. Together with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Server 2003, there are slightly over 1.5 million IP addresses running Microsoft operating systems, according to Netcraft.

Each month, Netcraft performs a survey of sites on the Web. Windows 2000/IIS 5.0 are up from less than 700,000 IP addresses in February 2002, according to a chart on the Netcraft site.

Normally, the U.K.-based outfit reports an operating system's or Web server's presence by the number of sites, of which Windows 2000 now has about 9 million. The 10.75 million total Microsoft-based sites Netcraft found across the Web in March 2003 made up about 27 percent of all sites. The open source Apache Web server still dominates, with 63 percent, or nearly 24.5 million sites.

Meanwhile, much of that volume of Windows 2000 sites lay exposed to the recent WebDAV vulnerability disclosed earlier this month. According to Netcraft, at the time Microsoft alerted users about the vulnerability, more than three quarters of those 1 million IP addresses showed that the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol was enabled. WebDAV is not supported in IIS 4.0 and the vulnerability is not supposed to affect IIS 6.0 in Windows Server 2003.

Netcraft said more than half of IIS 5.0 servers on the Web rebooted in the two days after the Microsoft bulletin, which included a patch that requires a reboot.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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