Slashdot Mirror

There's a very interesting post on kottke.org that discusses online applications in relation to weblogs. I quote:

Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner "listen" for new content from all those sources,
transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.

Apple use Akamai to host the iTunes store and their other web-sites. Akamai have server farms all over the world. So when you use the store you're actually talking to a fairly local server.

In response to earlier reports by a third-party website measurement service that inaccurately portrayed the impact of the attack on specific Web sites, Akamai released today the following information (based on Akamai's over 1,100 total customers under long-term services contracts):

* the domain name service impact was limited to approximately 4 percent of the Akamai customer base
* 2 percent had noticeable impact
* less than 1 percent of Akamai customers had a significant impact affecting more than 20 percent of their users

The problem was quickly detected by Akamai's automated monitoring systems, and Akamai personnel mitigated the attack by working closely with customers, making key adjustments in the Company's infrastructure, and cooperating with several network partners around the world to shut down the source of the attack. Further, Akamai is cooperating with U.S. Federal law enforcement agencies that are investigating the incident.

In response to earlier reports by a third-party website measurement service that inaccurately portrayed the impact of the attack on specific Web sites, Akamai released today the following information (based on Akamai's over 1,100 total customers under long-term services contracts):

* the domain name service impact was limited to approximately 4 percent of the Akamai customer base
* 2 percent had noticeable impact
* less than 1 percent of Akamai customers had a significant impact affecting more than 20 percent of their users

The problem was quickly detected by Akamai's automated monitoring systems, and Akamai personnel mitigated the attack by working closely with customers, making key adjustments in the Company's infrastructure, and cooperating with several network partners around the world to shut down the source of the attack. Further, Akamai is cooperating with U.S. Federal law enforcement agencies that are investigating the incident.

This should cause some problems for akami, they had an outage may 24th. Once can be overlooked twice? these are some big companies they are going to be calling them. I bet there is some sweating techs in the cool noc right now

It seems to me that all one would have to do to get around this is to use SSL. ISPs wouldn't be able to lower the priority of such communications without affecting many other applications, such as VPNs. They could still do it based on IP, but not if the providers of a service used some large provider like Akamai.

Anyway, regardless of whether it could be circumvented, and at what cost, the implication is still a further push away from the original spirit of the internet towards a network that is solely a means of extracting as much revenue from consumers as possible. I just wish it were more realisitc to create an ad-hoc network with all my friends...and their friends, etc. I think some day that is what the tech community will be forced to turn to someday, in order to retain the usability we have come to cherish.

Of couse keeping this theoretical peer network free and uncommercial would be very tough, if it got popular. Call me paranoid, but I'm looking into affordable methods of connecting my friends directly together, using wireless technology and encryption.

Am I the only one who has noticed that when you have a society of geeks who communicate mostly by text, there is a great disparity in the way people choose to pronounce things? At least most of us have settled on a pronunciation of Linux and J. K. Rowling's Hermione.

Am I the only one who has noticed that when you have a society of geeks who communicate mostly by text, there is a great disparity in the way people choose to pronounce things? At least most of us have settled on a pronunciation of Linux and J. K. Rowling's Hermione.

If an advertiser were to use Akamai they would be forcing the users to alienate themselves from a whole lot of other services by adding that to their hosts file. I'm not sure if Akamai has policies against hosting advertising clients or not, because I've never seen any of the like using them, but there might be a similar workaround piggybacking on another service.

I think that Akamai beat you to that service!

Well, Akamai seems to be hiring:

Check out Craig's list and their website

Try there?

According to this link, Google is not one of their customers.

Where the hell are people getting this info from? When I whois google.com I see the following:

Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US

Domain Name: google.com

Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com

Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1340142) Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506181499
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin (NIC-1340144) Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506181499

Created on..............: 1997-Sep-15.
Expires on..............: 2011-Sep-14.
Record last updated on..: 2003-Apr-07 10:42:46.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10
NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10

You mean like this?

...and subscribe for caching services from Akamai.
Hey, they could offer a free Linux binary licence for Akamai in exchange for the services :)
Akamai uses a few thousand Linux servers to ballance load to it's clients' machines and Microsoft had to hide behind them when MSBlaster attacked their windows update site

Motley Fool is pretty bullish on Akamai. Of course, they better be since they're a customer. However, many large companies rely on Akamai, including Best Buy, McAfee and MSNBC. Given that a good caching service can reduce bandwidth usage by 50% or more, any large website that uses a caching service is highly dependent on it. However, it'd be hard to run any type of large site without one - Akamai or whomoever.

Changing a caching provider is relatively easy once a contract is signed. A caching network is largely a DNS configuration change. One shouldn't need to change any telecommunications connections or reconfigure applications.

This looks like a big mistake - what happens if they want to use a different caching service, or Akamai goes bust? All the feeds will die.

Akamai has about 80% of that business. They're losing money, although they may pull through to profitability. They've dabbled with the ASP and "utility computing" things, but their main business remains high-volume web hosting.

hopefully I can finish downloading it before it gets apple-slashdotted...

Apple's stuff is hosted by Akamai. There is no way a site with as small a userbase as Slashdot could bring it down.

but i guess bumming off bittorrent/p2p bandwidth is not a bad idea either.

yes, I got that wrong for some reason, but it suprises me how mnay people can't learn to 'patch' a link :(

Akamai NOC tour

Wired article about Akamai's 'gods-eye' view of the Slammer virus

Akamai runs their 13,000+ node network on Linux as well... seems like an obvious target.

Complain.

Anyone think this one is misleading?

Intel Centrino Advert

If the Apple site gets bogged down

That's silly. Apple uses Akamai.

Luckily the world was saved from this possibility.

-John (now, one of those "why, back in my day..." story telling guys... sigh.)

" Does anyone have any bandwith available that could make an automated mirror for Slashdot stories?"

Of course they do, but that kind o' burst bandwidth costs $$$.

Who's paying?

Robust, distributed & effectively load-balaced hosting

T&K

Yes... take that with a pinch of salt :)

The reason for that bogus response is that their servers do indeed run IIS 6.0, but they're behind Akamai's distributed server platform. Akamai happen to run Linux.

Look at it this way - the said cybersquatter no longer needs to type WHOIS insert-domain-here or they can save a little bandwidth if they scripted the whois.

All they need to do is type (or script it) the web address or do a DNS lookup and see where it points too. It will usually point to a certain block unless they were to spread the load out and use a setup similar to Akamai.

It still opens a huge can of worms though. (what about other registrars who use the same TLDs?)

All those axxx.ms.a.microsoft.com servers are owned and operated by Akamai. I guess you could still razz MS about that, but AFAIK, there's no real alternative for that kind of service.

Since the EU is pushing this war, then the French won't back out of it.

eurotrash moderator: what the fuck is up with you? u must be one of those surrender puppets in france. is this your song?

Yeah, but you probably want to put out a branded version of BitTorrent with a nicer user interface.

The current UI looks like puked out in 2 days ;)

Also it might make sense to provide a BitTorrent version that installs through ActiveX. The download version should be offered for Linux, Mozilla and Opera users.

A K A M A I

And the obligatory link: www.akamai.com

It seems to me that this is exactly the type of problem that places like akamai and cable and wireless (was digital island) are trying to solve. Pay only for the bandwidth you use, leverage their existing distributed architecture, profit. You can try to get bustable bandwidth etc, but in the past I've found it to be more expensive. Things may have changed since them (a year ago) but you should still look into a content delivery network.

You can hear the moveon.org TV ad here (Windows Media), with some commentary and other media sound bites.

They have, and they are called Akamai. Their "edge-network" system also works with dynamic pages with some slight modifications on the server-end.

They're using the Akamai network...

Well, first off, I don't see the big deal about the BBC's load time going from .47 seconds to 1.88 seconds. It seems to me like they're doing just fine.

I know CNN used akamai for a little while because I remember seing the old ARL's on their images. We use akamai at the company I work for and I can't rave enough about their services. Our site peaked last year at 320mbit per second. It was right around 144GB in one hour. Thanks to akamai, we served that without so much as a hiccup. It was dished out from a cluster of 5 aging solaris boxen.

I was wondering if anyone has ever though about using their DNS servers to provide mirror information? A specially formated TXT-record could easily provide a DNS-cache-friendly mirror listing.

Akamai already do something like this, and they didn't need to extend the DNS protocol in any way. They even provide the mirrors for you, if you use their service, and take care of ensuring that users get redirected to the nearest mirror. Sure beats having to scroll through a long list like you have to on sites that mirror the old-fashioned way, particularly since a site physically close to you might actually have less bandwidth than a faraway one.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of cross between

• This story's p2p software
  
• swarmcast
  
• kazaa
  
• akamai
  

I know of no legitimate web site that requires third party domains.

How aboutApple? The majority of images come from Akamai, with server names of something like a772.g.akamai.net. Those are legitimate images, served from edge servers.

There are other sites I've seen that do this, but I can't think of them off the top of my head right now.

The Post also has a video (real) up with interviews and some views inside the building.

Web page

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/washte ch/010603-20v.htm

Direct Link

http://mfile.akamai.com/920/rm/thepost.download.ak amai.com/920/washtech/010603-20v.ram

On that note, for those of you who missed the link at the bottom of the article, a video of the facility is also included:

Original Embedded Video Page
Direct Link

The video is in Real format.

It's not Apple's servers/bandwidth. It's Akamai's. They're not getting Slashdotted any time soon. :)

No, it is because of Yahoo!'s army of Akamai servers.

Well, Akamai seems to have the best handle on this. I know it's not exactly the same as P2P, but the transfer model is similar... Someone in one corner of the net wants a file, and the user is directed to the proxy server closest to them. If that server doesn't have it, it asks its neighbors, until a copy of the requested data gets passed to it. The data then gets cached at that proxy on the chance that someone else in the neighborhood might be interested as well.

Well, even the Lawyer that is representing the class action lawsuit against IBM (streaming video) is only claiming a 1% failure rate, and the only model in question is the 75 GXP.

The fact is IBM had some quality control problems with the 75 GXPs, but they have been fixed. And it wasn't too many years ago when people were saying the same things about Western Digital drives.

I think you always have to take this anecdotal evidence (i.e. "My friend had this drive and it sucked") with a grain of salt.

The only way it would ever work is if they partner with the ISP to host data on their internal network (or a dedicated link to their own network).

You mean like Akamai's core service? Apple already does this with QuickTime movie trailers.

Okay, now P2P to solve multi-cast routing of streaming live content like movies and audio broadcasts so if 50 people on a single ISP are watching a football game broadcast over the internet live efficiently that's cool. Web pages are trivial. ISP's, businesses, colleges, have all solved this problem for the end consumer. Shit, you can't go to www.yahoo.com anymore without hitting an Akaima server. All cable modem providers in my area use transparent squid proxies to speed up web browsing.

If P2P's big goal is to solve a trivial problem solved by the HTTP 1.1 spec, in conjunction with a couple of Open Source products, plus a couple of large business, I'd say P2P is about 3 years behind the times....

That said, P2P has some cool applications and will solve some cool problems, I don't think Web pages is one of them.

Kirby

Very much so