While researching to make sure my computer wouldn’t explode at exactly 12:00AM on Wednesday, I happened to see on that site that to check a server’s time, you can look up HTTP information via telnet (Note: This will only work on computers running Windows XP or below. Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not include telnet by default).

While examining these headers, I happened to see something very interesting with the site I tried: the very popular MSN.com.

Check after the break for an analysis along with other targets.

It would appear from looking at the information provided there that MSN is running on IIS 6.0 and that page was built with ASP.NET 1.1. Both of those relate to “2003″ versions of Microsoft systems – IIS 6.0 included with Windows Server 2003. ASP.NET was launched at the same time. That means that it appears that MSN.com – the number 6 site on the web according to Alexa – is running on software that’s now quite outdated. It seems very odd that they would be running such an important site on software that old, especially considering that the MSN landing page has been updated, in rather significant ways, many times since 2003!

But wait, there’s more

Seeing that site was running on old server software, I decided to see what was up with other Microsoft sites. Rather than mess around with telnet (remember, I’m a child of the GUI – DOS is something I only rarely interacted with in my early computing years), I decided to use the extention Firebug for Mozilla Firefox to extract all the juicy information I wanted from my headers.

Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I stopped by Bink.nu since they advertise that they themselves are running IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 (correlating to Windows Server 2008). Sure enough, Bink is running IIS 7.0. It reports that the ASP.NET version is only 2.0, but I’m willing to say that’s just an error in that header it’s because .net 3.5 is just .net 2.0 with WinFX bits bolted on. [Props to Benjamin for the reminder. ~Bryant]

LiveSide reported the same bites of information as Bink.nu, which makes sense once you consider that their back-ends are very similar (both sites are powered by Community Server).

I then decided to check other Microsoft sites. First up, Microsoft.com – the company’s homepage. Again, Firebug reported the ASP.NET version was version 2.0. The real shocker, though, was in the server line. It is reported that Microsoft.com is running on IIS 7.5. This version of Microsoft’s web server is to be included in Windows 7 (Home Premium and above) and Windows Server 2008 R2. That’s right, software that hasn’t been released yet. That is quite a leap of faith to be running your whole corporate main site on prerelease software. It’s also quite a difference from what MSN reports. The servers for “Windows.com” will also report the same information. Update: Microsoft did clarify the move to IIS 7.5 in Early February. You can read this here. ~Bryant

MSDN reports that it is running IIS 7.0, which is a bit more reasonable and also the least surprising. Truthfully, it’s what I expected to see running everywhere here in April 2009. Finally, Live Search refused to give up it’s server info, just informing me that it was powered by ASP.NET (no surprises there).

What can we see from these seemingly random version numbers? We can see just how complex Microsoft’s web servers are. They range from the nearly outdated (especially for a company that develops web server software) to the bleeding-edge software that isn’t even released yet and many things in between. At the very least, this gives an insight both into the different requirements for the many pages at Microsoft as well as the different practices between different teams of developers. One would probably bounce between at least five or six different web server versions (major versions, not minor revisions like the 2.2.11 of Apache) each day in your daily web travels. As long as it serves up your pages and isn’t riddled with more holes than swiss cheese… that’s the main idea isn’t it?

In case you’re interested…

Apple.com runs on Apache as well: version 2.2.8. Mac OS X Server 10.5 says that it includes Apache 2.2, so it would be a pretty solid guess to say that Apple.com is powered by an Xserve.