Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Back Online
I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it, thus triggering the end of several nearby worlds as well. Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online. We'll post more when we know it.
Microsoft's DNS Servers were not "cracked"
The segment they were on were attacked via DOS (Denial of service). They went with Akamai to distribute the DNS workload globally.
". Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. "
So its on their side, if its on EXEs side, then where is their 24hr support?
no, its over when www.google.com doesnt respond..
are there any pics of the female cisco tech?
Thus proving once and for all that x^2 + y^2 and x^2 + 103y^2 cannot both be squares for non-zero integers x,y.
Jeff and Rob are not easy to work with. Best wishes to my replacement.
- Anne Tomlinson
I've never heard of you anne, but thats a pretty impressive troll. No doubt I'm hard to work w/. I'm a perfectionist. But neither of those phrases sounds like Jeff or I. We'd be much less polite.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
SlashNET can and has held more clients than we received during this outage. During past forums, we've gotten more than we got this weekend.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
If you're a perfectionist, I'm Miyazaki.
--
--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
nothing is funnier when user friendly does it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What about the lusers who call their ISP's tech support and complain that "the internet is down"?
I don't think the source of the paycheck was the point. Rather, the process of troubleshooting requires concentration, and if the customer can't go one measly hour without sending you an interrupt -- let alone can't refrain from verbal abuse -- it's time to yank them off the bus. Besides, who's in short supply here: the techie or the customer? Life's too short to work for a dick.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Sound just the sort of thing to be written by an EX-other-half...(lets see if that links page gets updated soon).
Thought this had something with the 50% staff reduction VA is having on Wednesday. For a moment it looked like CmdrTaco got fired and crashed the server on his way out or something. Fortunately now we can read all about the latest conspiracy to spam email.
they're all OSDN stuff. it was an OSDN cisco router that melted, see http://usw-sf-log.sourceforge.net/
That's fine... Kuro5hin was up all weekend. Are they somewhere physically (and logically) different?
If you're running something like a 75xx series router, there are multiple processors. To cope with high load, you run VIP cards. Each VIP card accepts two interface cards, which have, for example 4 serial ports.
The interface connects to the VIP over a dedicated PCI bus - so each interface has it's own PCI to teh VIP. The VIP has its own processor on board - if you run distributed switching, then the VIP has the full forwarding table, and can route packets to other interfaces. So, in any high end router, you've got multiple processors all talking to each other, with the master processor talking to other routers and keeping the routing tables updated.
If you know the commands, you can actually log in to the VIP cards - they run a full IOS.
Sounds like the redundant Supervisor on their 6509 didn't work as promised.
I love to see the Cisco ticket on this one! I've never seen one fail either.
You can't see jaggies, because you have a low-pass filter in your retinas, due to irregularites in their structure.
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
I knew you could!
/., I would think there would be more redundancy on the hardware level as well...
This being
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The major problem would be IO bandwidth, so you'd have to use something other than multiple cards in a 32bit 33MHz PCI bus. That has a theoretical limit of 132 MB/s, which is too low a bisection bandwidth for any respectable gigE switch. NVidia's nforce chipset has two PCI busses, just like my old Mac clone from Daystar, so that would help some. Still, with a server mobo and some 64bit 66MHz PCI busses, you'd have 528MB/s per bus. That's decent, but still nowhere near what you want for 24 GE ports. You'd also need to buy several 4-port NICs, and find slots to put them in. Switches really are hard to do with software on commodity machines. Routing is another matter, unless you have a lot of subnets and need a lot of bisection bandwidth, I guess. (If you were going to be limited by the fact that all the traffic was going up or down through one of the interfaces, and not between two internal ones, then a computer with NICs could probably do the job reasonably well.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Well, for the past 36 hours at least Mae West has been un-responsive to the rest of the world. Basically, for those of us down under, that's let about 40% of the USA sites unreachable. Didn't even realise /. was dead, just thought the whole of the USA was dead (and started rejoicing at the thought.... :P )
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
I beg to differ. You may wish to have a look at the online traffic analysis reports at various places that map network traffic. The one I go to is the Internet Traffic Report It quite clearly shows that Mae West has been generating 100% packet loss for well over 24hrs now. Here's the North American page. According to the 7 day report, it dropped off air on the 21st and hasn't been back since. Means that I still can't get to most USA based sites that I like to frequent. Sure the 'net routes around the problem, but when something like 70% of the asia-pacific traffic goes through it, that puts a hell of a lot of strain on all the other points.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
HSRP.
/., listening to 'Flood' in iTunes (on the cube that received my old server's PC100 DIMMs today.. 768MB!), while MandrakeUpdate is downloading the 8.0 updates in (WAIT FOR IT..........) XDarwin over SSH.
Still, I guess uptime on a sunday doesn't matter.. my own piddly box was down for a couple of weeks while I waited for a shitty enough day to waste on a sys rebuild..
The poor thing. It ran on 2x400MHz Celerons clock'd to 533, 256MB RAM on an Abit BP6. The RAM seems fine and the HDDs had no issues (I used the opportunity to drop my new copy of Mandrake PowerPack 8.0 and do everything right as Reiser from starters), I built the new system on a spare HDD and nuked the old partitions for MP3 space. Everything seems pretty hunky dory, though there are a few little bits that need reworkign and I need to rebuild my NFS/Appletalk shares..
ObGeek: Right now I'm posting to
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Shouldn't an update be appended to the complete original text of the story and clearly marked as such, rather than appear to be an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I had no idea that there was a Japanese version of Slashdot but one look at it goes a long way toward explaning why so much of the spam I get is composed of (to me) undecipherable characters. How many "foreign" Slashdots are there?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Nope, their "single point of failure" was VA Linux. har har har
Seriously though, what's up with the word on the street that this company is tanking? All that I've heard so far is rumors. Does anyone have any substantiated evidence?
--
Phew, I thought my weekend was ruined. I was starting to shake and breakout into a sweat.
heise.de had it in its newsticker: http://heise.de/newsticker/data/vza-24.06.01-002/ (sorry, it's in German).
Ive always said the most powerful man on the internet is a high-school dropout with a backhoe.
1-800-digsafe? nah, dont ever call it
Its called being lazy and unresourceful.
Nah, it's called putting too much faith in a shitty co-location provider. Would YOU trust your network with a company whose named means "a mass departure?"
Try Inflow, their people are smarter and their service is better.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
I thought I was the only one who saw the post on nanog. I got a big kick out of it. I think that we should have a ask slashdot about whre you saw slashdot's downtime mentioned... I love nanog...
Douglas Calvert
No, I don't think so. Maybe 10-15 minutes. I jumped over to k5 to check out the article there and by the time I returned it had been changed.
Why does it have to be a "she" thing. Utterly rediculous if you ask me. Sounded to me like Rob was just pissed that
Having worked in a high stress environment, I know that screaming and cussing have no room in this type of environment.
Keep in mind that this is an unusual situation and it's very likely that Rob/Jeff did not handle the situation properly.
If "she" was a contractor, she should be used to dealing with customers. It's a high stress situation and the contractor has to be able to take a certain amount of grip. The company that she was contracting should have had a account executive on the phone to take that grief so that she could do her job properly. And with the bills slashdot/OSDN generates in connection fees they should have had a service guarentee (sp?).
If she was an employee the fault really lies with whoever employed her, training should be a key component of any technical employee, and without enough training time nothing can be done. If she couldn't be trained then the employer should have realized this a long time ago and moved her out of a critical position.
I didn't think the first post was that bad, personally. Just a statement of facts. It also might not have been changed intentionally, I notice that a lot of messages that were put into the system just after it came up are missing as well. Perhaps they reloaded the database and had to type in the explaination again...
Anyway, I don't think this was gender related at all, just a statements of facts, that was possibly changed to not place blame on someone when the situation was not "standard".
Lando
PS. One of the biggest problems I ever encountered was a Cisco problem, where they were suprized by something their hardware did. The company president where I was working sent customer reps to most of the major customers and those reps slept in the customers offices. Which is why you hire professional operation centers for critical services. Our down time on that problem was 22 hours. Rob/Jeff don't have that experience and I believe they are due a little leniency, as should the tech. But trying to turn this into a gender issue is just clouding the issue.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Welcome back Cmdr... We missed you...
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Nod,
It was pointed out to me a couple of years ago that bind doesn't really implement the RFC for dns. There are a lot of problems with the bind implementation, but since bind is the default, it's hard to get a "proper" dns working since the standard is bind's implementation.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Thanks,
Will check it out.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Well myself, I went jogging, and I noticed the birds that were flying around actually had realistic "surround" effects, so that when I closed my eyes, I could almost feel them moving around me. Very lifelike.
The attention to detail was truly amazing. Car horns honked and the sound echoed just the way you'd have expected in a ultra-realistic video game-- only better.
Very hard to describe, but definately worth it trying again in a couple months.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
when slashdot when down when rob would get drunk and puke on the alpha
I wonder why /., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
If you'd read teh post on newsforge, you'd know that it was EXODUS's routers that went down, NOT OSDN's. RTF News Articles.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Several hours into the outage withdrawals started
/. site.
/. being down:
6 32 234&mode=thread&threshold=
to set in and I knew I had to do something!
By chance, I found Japan's
Buried on that page, I caught a
posting about the US
http://slashdot.ne.jp/article.pl?sid=01/06/24/0
And ran it thru babelfish for a laugh...
The first comment is titled: "It knocks down Internet, rubbing, it
does,"
ROFL!!!!
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
Mae West has been unresponsive to the west of the world for several years. She died in 1980, so that's a bit more than 36 hours. Seriously, though, what are you referring to by Mae West?
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Rob would never use "you're" and "your" in the appropriate situation.
Hey, Ceesco, what's theese "melting" idea--
blackboxing the problem so even tech minds will lose the trail?
Hey, "melted[blackboxing the problem]" Ceesco
router, we don't need no steenkin' badges.
A dozen linux open source discussion and project .20 .35 .61 .81 .150 .
sites go down, whois Exodus Comm (NETBLK-EC21-1)
64.28.64.0 - 64.28.95.255 sites
and
Tricky - whois on the site names returns
Andover.net, whois on the IP's of those sites
returns "steenkin' badges" i.e. FBI Exodus
Comm, "hey, Ceesco"--
"Sunday June 24, @07:30PM
- by Robin "Roblimo" Miller -"
"On Saturday, June 23, the primary controller
in the router that controls access to all OSDN
servers hosted at the Exodus facility in
Waltham, MA, suffered a catastrophic
failure...The first Cisco support people
contacted professed to be 'amazed' at the
situation,saying it was the first time they
had seen a failure of this kind."--the third
kind, MIB, Bill Hancock's men-in-black!
Ceesco, maybe we have heard of this before.
Maybe those SYN packets from Exodus Comm's
sourceforge1 debian ftp server which elicit
a return packet of unknown protocol are
steenkin' badges, Ceesco. Maybe FBI Hancock's
Exodus Comm is doing a leetle back door
visiting with yo mama, eh, Ceesco?
Andover.net is stock symbol LNUX, company name
VALinux.VA Linux has bought up a lot of linux
sites. Another alias for that netblock is Open
Source Development Network. Press releases
describing the outage said OSDN technicians were
working on the problem. Has FBI Exodus bought VA
Linux, which is another very troubled company?
VA Linux also owns the sourceforge network, which
has three ftp linux servers, of which one is an
Exodus server rudely sending no-no SYN packets
which made my teenage daughter pregnant.
Linus Torvalds, Finn who invented linux,
still presides over development, but works at
Transmeta on a new processor which appears on
top Japanese notebooks. Transmeta is controlled
by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, owner of
AOL, who bought Netscape. AOL hq is Vienna, and
AOL has data centers on either side of
Rockwell/NRO/CIA, which was built off the books
without congressional oversight. Trust Hancock,
right.
NSA is backing a variation of linux with more
separation between user spaces in memory, which
will be more secure.
The point of the day is that just as rebellious
youth get their drugs from the government, they
get their open source software from the FBI if
they get it from 216.136.171.195 sourceforge1 .
When a site goes down, FBI #1 e-forensic Hancock's
/animfactory goes down, blame Hancock. "To compete
sappers, er, servers, are on the blink, er, WTC
Salem, uh, Waco front door, umm, OKC
Petruskie/Strassmeir, oh, i mean PanAm
Lockerbie McKee, no, TWA800, uh, Columbine
book/vid/agent-in-charge, on the job, that's it,
on the job, right Whitehurst? Whitehurst? Oops,
he was competent on the job, oh well. Spywhare
hooks make Hancock's servers clunky. Spywhare
servers go down a lot, so to speak. They induce
other parts to go down with them, so to speak.
Poor Ceesco's not the only one. Yahoo went down,
blame Hancock. Linux world alias VA
slashdot/freshmeat/osdn/themes/thinkgeek/gifworks
with me is SYN. -JD Rockefeller". Linux was
PROMISing but Bill Gates hates to see crumbs go to
waste around the edges, and Gates' MIB don't do rehab.
-Bob
The good news is that they are sharkproof. The bad news is that they aren't waterproof.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And if the other pronoun "he" had been used, Slashdot would have lost 95% of its audience?
If you believe that, then you're stupid. And if you don't believe that, then you must think females are a special case, making you a sexist.
So which are you? Stupid or sexist?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There is a big difference between covering open source and free software, and actually advocating and believing it. Slashdot does a pretty good job of the former, but is .. uh .. "objective" enough to
avoid doing the latter.
Although Slashdot seems to conform (mostly) when you look purely at the source-code aspect of things, they very clearly work directly against open source interests when you look at file format and multimedia issues. For example:
- Slashdot uses GIFs for images
- Slashdot uses MP3 for it's "radio" program
- Slashdot editors advocate the purchase of DVDs
You can't use interfaces/formats that require licenses, and stay free (and in many cases, you can't even have open source). Content providers that use/advocate this stuff, indirectly work to encourage people to stop using and developing free and open software. The use of a user-unmaintable router is very minor and insignificant by comparison.Slashdot does overall have a positive influence, though, and from the selection of stories, it is very clear that the editors are at least very interested in the topic of open source. But calling them "champions of open source" is completely inappropriate.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Not when it really is an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said...
Why not use Linux ?
Why not use the Linux Virtual Server Project.
They have really nice failover support.
Also OSDN employees should probably know by now how to handle Linux machine and routers and firewalling, right ?
New things are always on the horizon
SomethingAwful.com went down because of reasons not related to the OSDN outage... Their host burnt out a hard disk because of power problems. SomethingAwful isn't connected to the OSDN network in any way. (It was actually part of eFront until that scam collapsed.) SA is back up now, as are several other sites affected by the same problem.
(This does not mean I represent OSDN or SA, because I don't - I just know what's up on the SA side of things.)
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
One little question: Who cares?
If you by any chance think its a valid comment, then drag itover ffs. You cannot expect everybody to read both places.
And listen you idiotic pup. Not everybody thinks that "Karma" is life, death and everything.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
So why is it that most ISPs hire less qualified people? Is it because you get what you pay for?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yup. But DNS seems to be one of the most poorly managed things on the net. When it's only done half-right, most people can still get to most places and they think it's correct, but subtle problems do exist in many ways, especially with caching, and most admins have no clue about what or why or even realize it's a DNS problem, saying "It can't be DNS, I can get there".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Woo ... those deep deep technical terms again, like "melted". OMG, that's so deep it's not even in my CCIE books. Well at least it's back to solid form now.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I had a Cisco router lose the smoke built into it's power supply once. Fortunately it was one of two routers running in parallel, so for the 4 hours it took to get a replacement, we were actually up all the time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Nor are servers and ads.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
A choice today is djbdns.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Oops. Read that too fast, parsed that as "perl autistic," and my first thought was, "How appropriate."
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Or someone put a link to /. up on a certain Christmas Island website.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Homo Sexual Routing Protocol?
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Don't forget the dangling, abbreviated participle.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
$ whois slashdot.org
Server Name: SLASHDOT.ORG.SUCKS.COMPARED.TO.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
IP Address: 24.240.60.16
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
How about "Hot Spare Routing Protocol".
Sounds like its time for you to cut that mullet off and move out of mom's basement.
I was depressed because it's long offline. Just managed to get some anti-depressants today and Slashdot is back online... damn, waste of money.
A sig is redundant.
Hemos decided to test Exodus' claim that the colocation cages were sharkproof. He had them lower the cage with him inside.
Poor bastard...
Join the Great Fujisan Expedition!
-- My Weblog.
I remember how stressed out my cat, Kyoto, was when she became Cisco Certified.
:) "she" knows a little too much about PostgreSQL vs. MySQL.
:).
:)
Well, for all of you wondering whether or not this is the real Sarcasta, as in Rob "Cmdr Dorko...err..Taco" Malda's other half, Kathleen Fent...here is your answer right here, plain as day.
If you check out this pageyou'll quickly see that Aunt Kathy here doesn't have a cat named Kyoto .
Combine this with the fact that for a Mac using graphic designer (and I know many
Add to that the high user number (c'mon, if this was Taco's chick, she'd be like a high user number, right?
No way. Taco: If this user is really your chick, tell us.
And to the holder of this Sarcasta account: Do try to do a little research before you troll as Sarcasta, 'k?
My journal has hot
If you read above, there were two of them. The failover didn't work, and the secondary router didn't ever come online (until this morning). Even Cisco was surprised by this, but that's what happened.
I think there was an unintentional emphasis on the *she*... Maybe that's what ticked off upper management :/
When's the last time Slashdot had 10 employees on the list of "World's richest people"?
When's the last time Rob's gross was measured in the billions?
When's the last time Slashdot's DNS servers were down?
Get the hint? I could go on...
When's the last time Slashdot attempted to publically humiliate Microsoft?
uh, scratch that one.
I thought it was netauthority.org
You're right, the Slashdot guys screwed up .. I want my money back, right now, you cheap Slashdot motherfuckers. How dare you run a free website without online fail-over routers? I'm goin' down to the Salvation Army and getting some free lunch and when I get back I want to see TWO rows of blinky lights in that rack, or I want a refund on my subscription, pronto.
Am I the only one that doesn't think this post should be taken at face value? To believe that this is really the tech in question, you have to believe one of these things:
Does anyone want to buy some Man Beef or a Bonsai Kitten kit?
Greg
Funny, isn't it?
And people wonder why Linux users buy less software than Windows users... If mtr was a standard program on all Windows (even server-level only) boxes, people wouldn't have to buy a shareware program to do the same thing..
And what admin in the middle of a huge crash cares about the pretty path the packets take? They want to know which router is down, but they don't care about its ICBM address (unless the problem is really bad.)
* The other reason Linux users don't buy software is that 1) many Linux boxes don't have users, 2) many Linux users are in 'poor' countries where the purchase price of MS Office would be a year's wages, or 3) is it worth paying $30 for a shareware program when the free one is just as good and maybe just not quite as pretty?
I buy windows software but not Linux, not because I don't think Linux developers need money, but because I haven't found a Linux program that I'd want to buy (and had to buy).
Now, if Q3 for Linux came out as soon as for Win32, I'd have bought that, but I'm not waiting a few weeks for a political statement.
True. Freshmeat.net was affected, at least from my 'net entrypoint.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Ha, ha, ha. I think I'm going to have to give up satire.
:)
A little like Tom Lehrer retiring when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming that "satire was dead"?
deus does not exist but if he does
Yes, I have to admit. That was rather entertaining. Can't replace slashdot, but it was a decent temporary alternative, and almost as fulfilling. :)
+1 Pimp (those that were there will know.... )
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Wow. Did anyone notice that the sentence about the cisco woman being unqualified and then quitting was removed from the paragraph? Looks like someone had second thoughts...
...These aren't the droids you're looking for....Move along....
Or Lucent, rather. Pipelines (formerly Ascend) are quite nice and reliable.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
yes. if you want to know where stuff is look at http://www.visualroute.com ...try the demo servers..its a java applet which
does a visual traceroute and reverse DNS lookup.
exodus is having problems.. see here :x .p hp?newsid=13119209103&page=1&parentid=0&crapfilter =1
http://forum.fuckedcompany.com/phpcomments/inde
Also exodus has burned thru nearly 500mil in 6 months of their $1bil cash reserves. not good.
There is nothing wrong about it at all. There are after horus trading exchanges and its quite legal to sell your stock because something you learn from a public source indicates they are dot.com'd.
Now if your told by the CFO to type up the letter saying everyone is fired and you call your broker with a sell order, thats different. Of course its legal a second after it hits f*compay.com
Currently at f*company there is a bit about Exodus not going down however... I was there becuase /. was down and I was wondering if VA had let everyone go. Was there a spike in the sale of VA shares offered? It was the weekend so the major stock exchanges were closed and I don't know if VA trades anywhere after hours but it would be interesting to see if a bunch of geeks start bailing out of socks when the company goes offline.
Mabe a stock price drop makes that spare router a bit more economically feasible.
Try this:
:-)
1. ipchains -I output -d 0/0 80 -y -l -j ACCEPT # i.e. log the IP address of outbound web connections; this is for Linux 2.2, YMMV
2. Pull up a site which has round robin A records with multiple IP's (IIRC www.yahoo.com will do; if you want URL for one of ours, send me email - I don't want to Slashdot my customers
3. Find out the IP address the browser is using in the logs. Observe that since the browser caches the result of gethostbyname() it keeps using the same one.
4. ipchains -I output -d xxxx -j REJECT
5. Hit another link and see what happens
You are talking out of your rear.
:-)
We use Exodus, and they provide us with two separate ethernet feeds, down separate cable runs, from two separate routers in different parts of the internal NOC. No need for any routers at all; we have separate endpoint hardware on each feed and just do a rough load balance across the feeds with round robin DNS.
The recommended (by Exodus) alternative is to have a pair of peered routers which actively load balance across the feeds at the IP level, and back up each other if one goes down. I didn't do this as we're a startup I didn't want to pay for an extra pair of routers.
Either of the above will ensure that there is no single point of failure on the front end. This is referred to as a dual-homed configuration. Exodus' WAN will ensure there is no SPF further out; making your own equipment cluster and software fault tolerant is your problem
It sounds like Slashdot is running with a single-homed connection, and that the router which failed is their own kit in their own rack. $$ permitting, they could have either (a) done a proper dual-homed setup, as per one of the above, or (b) had a spare router sitting in the rack and lease Exodus' managed hardware monitoring service, which would have meant Exodus techs switching it out when it failed.
I don't know what Slashdot's budget for hosting is, but we are a much smaller company than Andover and dual-homed service is not exactly killing our budget. I would conservatively assume that bandwidth is Slashdot's biggest expense.
You cannot throw pies at the co-lo provider for your own failure to have a robust setup and make proper use of the facilities they offer.
If this is a troll, then it's also defamatory and I'm surprised that it hasn't been removed or
modded to -2.
If this is true, then it shows Jeff and Rob to be very unprofessional and even childlish. I would
never treat anyone working for me like that, and neither would I accept such behaviour from an
employer.
If the started of work was not as expected, then they should have terminated the contract or asked
to have the the worker replaced.
Personal attacks are never justified in a business environment.
I would say that if the above post is true, then this is clearly a hostile work environment, and
may even could be considered sexual harrassment, and could quite possible leave VA open to a law
suit.
I've looked through this whole thread, and I have not seen any comment on either the above post,
or the changing story headline by anyone from slashdot or VA.
Come on Jeff and Rob, either defend youselves, or make at least make a public apology for your
behaviour.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Actually they're using an Arrowpoint CS-800 (can't recall offhand if was a single box or an actual redundant pair). Sweet box.. until Cisco bought Arrowpoint and then proceeded muck it up by "migrating" the CS OS to an "IOS-friendly" standard.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Not at all, if you'd take less than 5 minutes to look at why. But here, I'll do it for you.
Let's sart with slashdot.org's IP address as a base, so we know where "home" is -- 64.28.67.150 (Exodus). Now, looking up slashdot.org's info in NSI's database tells me that the first name server (64.28.67.55) is in the same netblock, but the second one (209.192.217.105) is somewhere else entirely (belonging to Shore.net).
So we've established that even if our link to "home" is severed, we can still do DNS lookups.
Now let's look up sebastian.slashdot.org -- 206.170.14.75, yet another netblock entirely (appears to belong to Up Networks).
So in a nutshell, router to Exodus goes down, so the dns lookup for sebastian.slashdot.org goes to Shore.net instead, where it gets pointed to Up Networks.
nslookup and traceroute are your friends. Use them.
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
<slashdot doesn't load>
"Hmm... let's try another site... how 'bout freshmeat...?"
<freshmeat doesn't load>
"@#$%^! Net's down..."
T'was horrible.
No slashdot...no SomethingAwful
I had to spend time OUTSIDE!!! and WITH MY FAMILY!!!
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
I'm fully aware that they are not related. Thanks for your preachy, condescending, legalese confirmation though.
Have a great day.
...or to cover up something your lawyers say you will regret having said...
Damn you Slashdot, due to your outage, I actually went outside!
Sounds like you need a new CCMF (Cisco certified mutha ........)
While I certainly have my doubts about the stories authenticity, it would surprise me if it were accurate in any case. I have been in that place, and while I did try to keep my verbal abuse of the techs on hand to a miniumum (I just told myself "be glad you don't have their job"), communications weren't always friendly, either. And this was for a much smaller site.
Yeah, but why would you spend a few zillion buck$ on an S/390 when you could buy a specialized Cisco router which is optimized for the job?
/.'s seemed to have crash&burned)
(Other than the fact that
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hardly. When you have a router/switch (6509), one failure wipes out the entire network.
Enough with the conspiracy theories.
--etrnl--
For those who don't know, Anne Tomlinson is the wife of George P. Burdell.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
...at least he mis-pronounced the punctuation.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
then why was freshmeat.com and others down? including thinkgeek.com
Cisco routers are good. Cisco IOS has tab completion too so THEY HAVE to be good :)
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
As a comrade in the gateway buisness, I know full well how hard it can be to work with a customer. Especially a customer who thinks that the world revolves around them. If I sat down long enough to write down all the bad things I have been called, a large portion of my week would be shot. Knucklefuck was my personal fav, but anyway.
Don't sweat it too much. One good thing about our job is we don't have to put up with the assholes we are currently working with. We can easily find a job with a completely new set of assholes.
On a side note, if you are in the process of doing your job and a customer is hovering over you, that qualifies as harasment. My current contract obligates me to hourly updates for priority customers. Anything more than that, and I cut them off. I would rather be elbows deep in a 7507 than in a meeting describing what I'll be doing when I am elbows deep.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Back when I was at Uni, one of the routers actually did melt down in the literal sense. We also once lost our internet connection when somebody decided to dig up the road.
Funny how things like that always happened on Fridays when a deadline was looming
--
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
Admit it. CmdrTaco was on another drinking binge and accidentally kicked out the power cord on the Cisco. How many times have we told him to stop abusing caffiene? Auto-Sig: X
/sig "Shop smart! Shop S-Mart!"
Here's a thought. Next time you can't get to /., before you rewire your entire town trying to get a good route, please try some other site. I hear there's a few other websites around.
You think that's bad?
I started reading Advogato..
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Kuro5hin is only loosely associated with OSDN. Yeah, we run their ads and get revenue that way, and we are listed in some of their material (but not all, and not often). We're not owned (even in part) by VA, and I don't know of any plans to 'buy' us (which makes sense, since they don't have to cover any costs).
:)).
I do all system administration -- DNS, mail, etc., whereas the VA owned sites all share the same pool of cool admins (like Yaz, Alliecat, etc).
Rusty and I are happy with our current colocation service (vhosting). We've never, ever had problems of connectivity (only of perl/admin error
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Actually, Ypsilon, Now acquired by Nokia, produces routers with a FreeBSD kernel. These are real FreeBSD machines, on Intel CPUs, with a very limited userspace, and some hacks to the motherboard. The thing is really fast. There was a dude saying that with Cisco hardware the packets don't hit the CPU. That's just half true. It depends on the header. If the roting is straightforward, then it's done in shared memory, but as soon as parts of the header contain pertinent information, the CPU is, indeed, involved, with Cisco routers, too. And the problem with Cisco routers is, that they don't have very fast CPUs. Of course, this depends on the model, but noone of them is as fast as, say, a 1 GHz Athlon.
Sigged!
And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit
I see you are checking your employees references just as much as you are checking the submission hyperlinks.....
Sorry, I had to take that stab. :)
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Next week, we will see another article telling us that Slashdot was down because of a router problem, but is now back up. This article will be written as if the author had never read the first one.
Do you mean melted down as in "quick grab the fire extinguisher" or melted down as in "swing the dead cat, something's not right here..." ??
Wheeeee
The lameness filter turned on itself.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Oh god the horror! They actually had to do work!
:-)
Anyway, what were you guys saying about a single point of failure? Its always funny when someone elses network blows up and dies, until its your own. Maybe this was just the gods way of saying "Shut up while your ahead".
Call me a troll all you want, but you know I'm right.
Brielle
Cyc is going open source, so here's a little anecdote that might be worth the read:
It was 1980 in a room at Arden Hills Operations. 2 floors below hummed and hissed one of the largest of the world's several legendary acreages of supercomputers, but these were fresh out of production, running through their paces with signs hanging over them saying things like "Los Alamos", "Lawrence Livermore" and, of course, "Fort Meade". One of Control Data Corporation's managers burst through the door to that room where, 2 floors above the humming and hissing, sat a bunch of fresh-out-of-the-University PLATO systems programmers, pounding away on around a million lines of COMPASS assembly language to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the Cybers. They didn't have the luxury of "C", let alone Perl, because there might be close to a thousand users actively sharing one Cyber mainframe, and every key press would pierce through the Cyber's peripheral processing units and the Network Operating System's drivers to activate a user's application program. They turned to look at the breathless manager who told them that the Japanese were coming -- armed with something called "Fifth Generation Computers" and that the US had better respond. They didn't know it then, but Control Data Corporation (still a darling of the spook-shops 7 years after Cray left CDC to put first current to a Cray-1) was taking a leading role in mobilizing its troops to respond to this, the Pearl Harbor of computing. They wanted programmers who would pack up their few possessions and move away from the Twin Cities to sunnier climes -- yet to be chosen but known to be some subtropical paradise such as San Diego and Austin. Eventually, Austin was chosen and a bunch of them _did_ pack up and leave the winterland for a summerland. I was there in that room and was among those who didn't volunteer. I stayed until that same manager told me they would not be needing the mass-market version of PLATO -- the very thing I had moved to Arden Hills to pursue, leaving behind Urbana, Illinois and a project to develop an 8086 OS for personal computing on an emulation of that processor written to run on a mainframe.
Urbana, Illinois, you might recall, was the fictional birthplace of the fictitious HAL 9000 computer of the science fiction story "2001: A Space Odessy" which was sponsored by CDC in its first network television broadcast, I believe on NBC, during which a CDC ad showed kids breaking into their school in Springfield, Illinois to access the PLATO terminals there. One of those kids was Steve Freyder, the guy who would end up as a PLATO system programmer in Urbana working on the 8086 emulator with me so we could write a pre-first-silicon personal computer OS but that was before that same manager hired me off to CDC telling me I could work on taking PLATO to the mass market. Urbana was also the place where another PLATO system programmer, Ray Ozzie, had created a notesfile (we called them "notesfiles" rather than "newsgroups") on the University of Illinois PLATO system -- a notesfile to discuss artificial intelligence. David Woolley had just implemented notesfiles on PLATO so anyone could create one and some of us were just creating stupid little notesfiles. I created "important notes", "stupid notes", "apathetic notes" and "commie notes", etc. Ray titled his notesfile "ain" which stood for Artificial Intelligence Notes. Ray used "ain" as a stage for what might be called an early experiment in performance art during which he drew AI adherents down into the stinking pits of neology where they would respond in earnest to travesties of "blocks world" composed of such Frank Zappa out-takes as "crux of the biscuit" based on new-fangled computing devices like "inverse muffler bearings". A good time was had by most. I think it is safe to say that even with all the creative humor poured into this effort, Ray had a "bad attitude" toward AI.
It was against this backdrop of derision against AI culture by the PLATO culture's leadership, despite the mythos of Urbana as HAL's birthplace, that the CDC managers were attempting to whip up excitement for a Manhattan Project among PLATO systems programmers against the Yellow Fifth Generation Computing Peril. It is a testament to Minnesotan restraint that not one person laughed out loud.
The Manhattan Project in Austin ended up being called the Microelectronics Computing Consortium (MCC) which is where Doug Lenat met with Marvin Minsky and started what would become Cyc.
See the LA Times story on Cyc going open source for more details.
Seastead this.
Sometime shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, I posted the following (with some edits since this version is from a copy I sent to my private email list). I verified it appeared on Slashdot but it is now gone from the Cyc story to which it had been posted and within which it did appear prior to the outtage, indicating there may need to be an investigation to ascertain the problem's full extent:
Fanatic responds:
What this has to do with Slashdot being down is anyone's guess
Are you referring to the idea, apparently shared by a moderator, that missing data is "Offtopic" when discussing a system outtage?
Seastead this.
Ah, I see, so the missing data, itself, would not be helpful to those who might wish to determine what had happened to it?
Seastead this.
"Must've hit pretty close to the mark to get Taco riled up like that..."
;)
I second that suggestion. There's probably better content in the battery than what's normally found here.
Interested in weather forecasting?
The original to this was a reader's letter submitted to GameFan[1] years ago. Circa 1996, I'd say.
1. The best console gaming mag in existance, until Imagine publishing killed it.
Made the mistake of goin' camping this weekend, and, got a little confused when I rigged up a Ponderosa pine that had a telephone line a couple feet from it with a WAP device a local squirrel was friendly enough to wear for the exercise after I gave him one of my nuts (not those nuts, you deviant; I had some planters in my napsack). Picked up e-mail through a pine cone; checked on my primary server through a knot-hole, and then slashdot. No dice.
Kinda feel bad, now that I'm home, that I didn't trust that squirrel and re-negged on the nuts. Guess I'll have to go back up there and make good on it. Sh|t, he's still got my WAP device! No wonder I don't have any mail.
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
"I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it. And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened. "
Damage control?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
By the number of people on #slashdot, I thought the whole thing was a clever ruse intended to see if they could bring down slashnet (as six thousand trolls go to see why they couldn't get their fix).
Steve
there is no thing
what else could you want?
Well that's the thing isn't it.
When Microsoft's routers went down then it can't be their routers (routers don't fail), it must have been their DNS servers running Windows. Ofcourse they needed to go and get some BSD CDs from some friendly geeks and install BSD on their DNS servers in order to get their sites back up. Right.....
If Slashdot's routers go down then it's definitely their routers - no doubt about it.
It is NEVER helpful to chew-out the person who's there to save your ass.
OTOH, there's a bit of a difference between a customer tounge lashing and "...spend the rest of your career filling-out FCC outage reports..." as would happen with a failure in that other networking technology.....
Remember, 5 9's means 5 9's no matter what the marketdroid said.
A new kind of meat designed to appeal to vegetarians.
Nope; you were right the first time. Neither is the subject of sounds; "neither" is a singular pronoun.
Matt
It seems strange that a high profile site like slashdot.org has one single point of failure? Are you guys still hosting this site in your basement? :)
:)
VA(your bosses) don't have a cage in some co-lo somewhere where u guys are setup through 2 core routers to multiple carriers?
P.S. I do network desgin work? need help?
date: 6:42pm
:)
uptime: 103 days, 3:19, 0 users,
load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.01
processes: 40
yesterday: 342595
today: 2347
ever: 430189382
Notice the discrepancy in today... hmmm guess routers down don't count in the Uptime script... time to add some snmp traps to it
What this has to do with Slashdot being down is anyone's guess...Amazing to hear about PLATO after all these years. For those who never had the pleasure (which is to say almost everyone) this was work on computer-aided education, started in the 70's (60s?) at University of Illinois Urbana. The terminals I worked with had translucent plasma screens. When photographic quality was needed, a projector on top of the unit was used - someone would insert a microfiche that had 256 different images on it and computer controlled pneumatic cylinders were used to select which image would be projected. I kid you not - I spent a couple of semesters making the electro-pneumatic assemblies. This was about 1973-74.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Weh.
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
With all those people downloading "Thong Song", it was only a matter of time.
You mean that really big room with the green shag carpet and the really bright light? The big ball of fire in the sky scared me so came back in here.
What type of hosting services wouldn't keep a spare, hot-swappable router in place? I remember reading about the new hosting service when /. moved, and being very impressed, but if they can't even get this right I would be very concerned.
-AndrewJNR, NSO, The Don College
the original statement was a little bit different:
I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it, thus triggering the end of several nearby worlds as well. And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit, thus terminating 3 local star systems. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened. But apparently creds go to Kurt Grey and Cisco tech support. Hopefully we'll have more info soon.
Damnitall... Just toss the router and hook up a 12 volt battery to your upstream connection.
Um money has nothing to do with it, and of course being open source and apparently not for much profit, they never will be billionaires. However, even the almost lowest common denomiator can set up some back up somewhere else. Hell, my bro's apartments servers have backups at another friends house. Its called being lazy and unresourceful.
Ok... so now that things are probably starting to cool down, would you mind telling us the full story? There are thousands of us waiting for it.
----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
This is redundant, but I don't care. Some new person male or female rushes into to this huge slashdot meltdown pile of shit on a weekend... sees how totally fucked up their system's configuration is... sees what a collection of morons work for slashdot... realizes that this could lead to days of pure hell in close quarters with the morons... decides that quitting is the only option available to retain sanity.
blah and then I didn't even log in. Man, I'm tired out.
Cisco Are Truly Safe: How are you gentlemen !!
Roblimo: C.A.T.S. !!!
C.A.T.S.: All your Anonymous Coward are belong to us.
C.A.T.S.: You have no chance to survive, make your time.
Roblimo: Someone set up us the bomb.
-Legion
Glad that's over. When I first noticed the outage, I thought it'd be brief. When it continued, I had a sinking feeling and started to consider the entities that would like to shut down slashdot legally.
It was like a mystery story that begins with the death of a controversial man. Everyone had a motive, from Microsoft to the MPAA to the Scientologists.
I had a surge of unhappiness at the thought that if Slashdot were really the victim of legal asault, we probably wouldn't learn the truth for a long time. VA's attorney would have told the employees not to comment. The whole community revolving around this site really counts for less to the legal system than some shopkeeper's (in the last analysis) claim of malicious interference with his tomatoes.
It made me think of the moment in The Hacker Crackdown when AT&T pulled the plug on a machine hosting an online community.
I tried reading kuro5hin. Everything is more reasoned, grammatical, lucid, correclty spelled -- and yet strangely lacking vitality. It was like walking through a clean and quiet museum, with 'do not touch' signs everywhere. There were no street urchins chalking obscene sketches on the marble walls. Maybe I'm a denizen of the lower depths of the internet and not suited to such musem atomspheres. Slashdot is like a real city, complete with beggars and drug addicts, while kuro5hin is perhaps like a mall.
Looks like it was just time for the /. admins to have a break. ;-)
(Most/all?) cisco routers do most of the work of moving packets from one interface to another entirely in hardware. The packet never hits the CPU at all. The CPU is there mostly to maintain the routing tables. It doesn't DO the routing at all. On a (PC) linux box, not only must every packet be routed explicitly by the CPU, but all traffic must go across the PCI bus, twice. A PC is just not the right architecture for a high traffic router.
Thank god you are back on line. I was losing it. I even started reading kuro5in.
Even more important, freshmeat is back. A weekend without freshmeat is no weekend at all.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
I dunno, I've been getting debs from sorceforge.net all weekend
Fish
You should get a riverstone router. They do opensource (perl artistic) even.
That was a shameless plug, by the way. :)
Q:Mommy, How can I become a good karma whore.
/., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
A: Steal posts from kuro5hin.
I wonder why
Exhibit A
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
Exhibit B
--
And for those that missed that part, the story was originally:
I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it. And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened
Hope this clears up what that poster was trying to say for all those late-comers.
/Mattias Wadenstein
All the versions I've seen personally in chronological order:
The one from another comment:
Version 1: I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened.
Version 2: Inject some stuff about the qualified person being a she, and not being very qualified, and quitting.
Version 3: Inject some weird stuff about neighboring starsystems also being blown up.
Am I losing my mind?
Dunno about the future, but current Cisco routers do have an operating system (Cisco OS), albeit a very specialized, streamlined one. Pure hardware routing just isn't flexible enough, so I doubt it will ever become prevalent.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Lots of times my switches/routers get fixed magically when I go back and delete out the bad config info that I put in by mistake. :) The redundant sup would have picked up the same bad config info from the primary and voila.. has the same problem. Then, when you go back in and "take out some mods that were made" everything comes back up. Probably not a prob with your redundant SP, bad configs can kill your switch in a heartbeat.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
==
CiscoChick: Look, Cisco is a Real Company(tm) that makes Real Money(tm). We have no use for your amateurish --
==
In light of Cisco's recent $2.5 billion excess inventory writeoff, the "makes Real Money" part of CiscoChick's line may need to be modified.
maru
Yeah, that's what I thought, with all the $ problems at at your parent company. I expected to see a story in The Register on Monday about the Slashdot guys being paid off and told to leave the premises immediately.
The other possibility was a DDOS attack, but most of your enemies are too dumb to manage this.
Just because OSDN went down does not mean that the Internet died. Take out MAE-EAST, the internet will still work. Won't be able to access all content, and things will be a bit haywire, but it'll still be around.
Plus, having two internet connections of a high speed nature is quite expensive, I really doubt they could afford it.
Shouldn't it have gone something like this? Dude, router's dead.
Crap. Can we ping through the switch to other servers?
Yup.
Can we ping this side of the router? What about the other side?
Nope.
Is it on?
Yup.
Spool up the console. Does the configuration match this handy printed version we have?
Yup.
Great. Call up Cisco, here's our service agreement number, and have a replacement sent within four hours. Better yet, plug in the spare. Better yet, grab the 486 in the corner, throw in a second NIC, Throw in pretty much any current OS other than MacOS 9, and turn on IP forwarding. Router, schmouter, at least until we get a new one.
OK.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I wonder why /., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
Your qualified personell would be just as qualified as the woman who quit, and it would have cost less. Plus, you could appeal to the masses with an Ask Slashdot about the best way to set it up!
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
Oh that is harsh. I just thought it was some random slashdot troll, till I checked the web site.
What is an IST major?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Yea but most people don't like to other people's paper. Sure I could link to cmdrtaco.com or hemos.com, but why would I want to?
Are you the real deal?
What is an IST major btw?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
You are looking at the wrong thing, check here
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Sarcasta also seems to know an autful lot about Oracle databases for a "Graphic Designer and Mac Lover".
Australian? Join EFA
Eck, I was holding my breath...
(can't go a 24 hours without my slashdot fix)
it really smells like the cisco hotshots were on a holiday. how about doing :
copy running-config tftp
on a routinely basis ?
Robert
I had to go outside.
*WEEP*
-------
Username taken, please choose another one.
and I though slashdot was slashdoted!
You know, I think that this was funnier when User Friendly did it. Much more creative, too.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
IIRC, they are using a Linux box for their load ballancer. It was their router that got fried, which is a completely different beast. Heavy duty routers remain specialized boxes, and Linux hasn't really serious inroads into that market yet.
Not funny at all when you get the facts straight. The serious problems that MS had were with their DNS servers- which were running Windows- not their routers. IIRC the DNS servers were later cracked, too, which was rightly seen as an indication of poor security. When Microsoft uses its own products, they don't stand up to the use they're being put to, and then Microsoft has to use *BSD based systems to get working again, that's very different from when a Linux site has its non-Linux hardware melt down (and the description did make it sound like a hardware, not software, problem).
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
All the conspiracy theroies seemed so real :-)
The reason you got only 4 point instead of the usual 5 is that you forgot the last part of a succesful post:
I know this is gonna hurt my karma but I'll post it anyway. MOD ME DOWN! I DON'T CARE.
--
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.
Personally, I think the sentence should read: "But neither of those phrases sounds like Jeff's nor mine." If we were to be really anal and grammar-friendly, we'd not start the sentence with "but"-- that's a faux pas.
Sorry about that. There shouldn't be an "s" in sounds either. The sentence should read: "But neither of those phrases sound like Jeff's nor mine." ("Nor" is used as opposed to "or" because the sentence has a negative tone. Just a geeky grammar rule there.)
Not to defend Taco, but the fact that Rob has stuck it out this long, despite the constant attacks, says alot. Personally, I am sick of the lies and innuendo at my own little virtual world, and am seriously considering dropping it for the sake of my own sanity. I troll here because making insightful commentary is a complete waste of time. Moderation is based more on a persons irrational whims than the actual content of the reply being moderated.
Mind you, the implementation and promotion of the "anonymous coward" *does* generate alot more trouble than its worth. But hey, that's just me.
Hey Rob, I may be critical of some of your choices, and am of the opinion that your moderation system sucks ass, but at least you are up front. You made something to be proud of.
Now fix the fucking moderation. =P
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
I really like the way they look at this:
Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world
'Only the end of the world', what is worse then the end of the world ? :)
---
Be in their own special space? IE: A read-only space? What more could possibly be contributed to this? 400 quotes from spammers saying "YAHAHAHA I DOSSED SLASHDOT?" A special in-depth report from the field about how it was fixed? Some karma whore posting 10 URL's about other routers that have crashed for various "hub" sites of the internet?
.. If you reply and say "You had something to say about this, so you can see some comments are needed." My reply is: If this topic were read-only, I wouldn't need to be posting this.
P.S. Just as an "in advance" thing
Everything else on /. is redundant--the stories, comments, lame jokes--so why don't we have redundant hardware too?
Me : Dude it's like Yahoo, it's never down.
ISP : Sa-lash dot?
Me : Dude slashdot.org!
ISP : www.
Me : No no no... listen 64.28.67.150
ISP : Uh... www
Me : Damnit I'm down can't you see I'm down?
ISP : We're like up and stuff. Is this a Macintosh?
Me : I am calling my lawyer! I'll sue you blind!
ISP : Uh I have to get my supervisor.
Me : -click-
---
This
Read Subject
move along, nothing to see here
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Right there on the front page. Heh, beautiful. pud 1 Cmdr 0
I agree! Let's end the patriarchical discrimination that keeps women from the upper levels of our businesses!
But let's keep the 'glass ceiling'. Then we can look up their dresses.
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
Just my $0.02. Ignore the flamebait; it's good to be back here.
Carousel is a lie!
Cisco supports a protocol called HSRP (Hot Swap Router Protocol). It's high availability for routers. I can't believe this wasn't in place. You guys are an online entity, right?
I'm working the CCIE right now, so if ya needs a hired gun...:)
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
what -- do you only use your machine for slashdot? didn't test to see if you could get anywhere else? are you some kinda nerd or something? ;-)
https://jamiesonbecker.com
Twenty-eight mods! That has got to be some kind of record!
__
I think they're lying. I was able to ping the router they said was a smoking heap of wreckage during the "blackout." I think they just got DDoSed and they don't want to admit it.
Real smooth blaming a grrl tech, too. They could have just said "the tech was incompetent" rather than bringing gender into the discussion.
We'll know for sure if they're being straight with us if this happens again.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/html/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You don't know how fsckn wrong you are.
Two of the best troubleshooters in my class are female.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/html/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Ahh.. /. is back. I never thought I had it, but the Rolling Blackout of Slashdot imposed by Cisco showed me how bad my Slashdot crack addiction is.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
(I don't beleive it, but I thought I'd say it before Steve Job's Zombie Army all posted that)
Can you give us any info on why she quit? From the short blurb, I can only think that she came in, didn't know exactly what to do, got chewed out, then ran out of the place crying. Hopefully I am wrong. This would make a great ask slashdot "how much leeway do you give a tech employee." I know when I started, I could do anything given enough time, but my employeer stuck with me. Granted in this case, there wasn't any time to waste.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Hey - You /. type folk have heard of OSDN, right? You know that OSDN facility in Acton? It happens to be in same building as one of Cisco's best TAC's. Anyone ever think of walking 22 feet, knocking on their door and saying "Hey - can one of you Cisco people give us a hand?"
I forbid you to ever go offline again!
Well, with the job market the way it is, and tech support being in such high demand and all, I would probably just quit too if I found a situation I didn't want to handle.
What do you mean the tech job markit is slowing down? Damn, I wonder if I can convince my boss I was just kidding.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
As a perfectionist, you'll of course want to know that you use "me" when the reference comes after the verb. "Neither of those phrases sounds like Jeff or me".
Also, given that you're a perfectionist, you'll be appalled to hear that someone has been using the "CmdrTaco" identity to post poorly spelled, ungrammatical crap all over Slashdot for the last three years. That same person has always tried to justify himself by whining that he "doesn't care about that stuff" and "doesn't want to be too fussy". This may or may not be the person who wrote the notoriously buggy first release of Slash, and said that it was "close enough".
But of course that couldn't be you
Because you're a perfectionist.
Ha, ha, ha. I think I'm going to have to give up satire.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Horray!!!!!! Long live slashdot!!!!
Isn't that "Whoray!!!!!!?"
sexism goes both ways, assuming someone isn't incompetent due to their gender is just as stupid as assuming they are
That's not how "feminism" or "sexual equality" work. Especially in Australia.
ppl will stop joining the various IRC channels i'm on and stop asking the same old question over and over again.. :P :)
All the banners are OSDN / ThinkGeek / VA ads anyway!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I thought the universe imploded, or worse, you switched to IIS.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Yeah, it seemed a little slower than normal, but was there a problem?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You expect me to believe a "catastrophic failure" was nothing more than a router going down? You guys got CRACKED! HA! Admit it!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Don't switch to a Linux box as a load balancer. You will not get any sleep, weekend time, or vacation... You will be constantly chasing after mysterious "problems".
You saw the daystar!? What was it like? Did you happen to see the silver circle as well with the small pixels that seem to need a monitor refresh rate change too?
Karma whorin' since 1999
*Cough* Freesco.org *Cough*
Months of uptime... The actual uptime figures don't tell the whole story here, because I tend to reboot it rather than just restart networking when I modify the forwarding/routing stuff...
One of you morons probably left your computer on, with the browswer set to Why I got Fired from Atom Films and SHE Saw it...
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
And now back to your regular anti-bsd anti-microsoft FUD!!
Good thing too, GNUflunkies were starting to form their own opinions about shit!
--
now what happened? Down several hours Tues am pdt... why?
sulli
RTFJ.
I went geocaching. Found the GCA30 cache (www.geocaching.com). Nice hike in Sullivan Valley. Woohoo!
Ugh! My fluorescent tan is gone -- replaced by a real sunburn! I'm shrivelling up! Help!!
-John
/. is certainly not a secret...Didn't you see the sarcasm in my post? Whatever....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The ISP I use actually had the slashdot headlines on their homepage up until recently. So I guess, some ISP's do know what it is (some geeks, must wander there, don't you think?). Now they give CNN headlines...*sigh*... Well it *is* an MS shop, so I guess IIS blocks slashdot ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
See? That's what you get with a closed source router.
Fast forward to today: "well, like our router melted... well, yes, all of our sites did depend on that one router, well, no, we didn't have a backup. But we're still better than Microsoft!"
Hemos: My Cisco router melted down. Can you please send someone over to fix it?
PS: Melted down? Did you put it in your oven too? You _do: know what a router is, don't you?
H: What I mean is that it's broken. It won't route traffic any more. I don't know what's wrong with it.
PS: Of course you dont, dear, noone knows. I'll send a nice young woman over to check up on yo.. sorry, check it out for you. Will tomorrow be okay?
H: No, I need to have it fixed right away, I have 1.000.000 visitors per. day, and I don't want to have any downtime.
PS: I'm sorry dear. But I can help you from here, if you want to. Just right-click on "My network-places" on your desktop. You see it right there, on the left hand side of the screen?
You: I can't reach my favorate site:
ISP: Ok, can you reach other sites?
You: Yes, but I can't reach this one. It must be your fault.
ISP: Well, what site are you trying to reach?
You: Slashdot. It's never down. It always works
ISP: I can't seem to reach it from here either. My guess is it's down.
You: No, it's your fault. I want to see my slashdot.
ISP: Let me do some tests. No, I'm sorry, that sight is down.
You: You are lying to me!! Just like AOL did. Your ISP sucks! I want a refund.
ISP: Well, you can reach every other site, right?
You: Yes.
ISP: Then most likely, the problem is with the website.
You: *explitive deleted* I want you supervisor.
ISP: Fine.
The Internet is generally stupid
Like an old friend it greated me this morning and all is well.
Leg Godt!
Ugh! My fluorescent tan is gone -- replaced by a real sunburn! I'm shrivelling up! Help!!
that's what aloe vera is for
I'd say the mention of them not being qualified would achieve that, if it was a male technician you wouldn't think of it as having anything to do with sexism. Which is a bias on your part. The mention of a female doesn't indicate blame based on sex, that's just the way you're interpreting it.
/. is back *G*
If you encourage people to avoid using the word "she" because people might assume it's a sexist comment, then that will (in turn) encourage sexism.
It won't encourage women to be viewed on equal footing if it keeps being brought up like this.
but I agree with you, who cares...
aloe vera is a type of plant!
pick part of the plant, squeeze it... ya got yourself some sunburn treatment... straight from mother nature... :o)
it's all bad without Slashdot
if that was a post about a guy, and he was thought to be less than qualified, would you be posting this?
sexism goes both ways, assuming someone isn't incompetent due to their gender is just as stupid as assuming they are
equal rights for incompetent people dammit! *L*
and yes, I am a chick
on a personal note, maybe that post was taken down due to it's rudeness, rather than the sex of the person involved...
my 2 cents...
considering that it comes from Rob's other half
Did it hit you that you are so ready for IBM?
It should, at least if I got the commercial correct.
God, the lack of posting comments was beginning to get to me, going cold turkey sure is hard.
--------
It was just a matter of time, wasn't it? ;-)
Marko.
IST? You wouldn't happen to be somehow affiliated with PSU would you? Just curious on the matter considering IST is my major, and I'm unaware of any other universities using that acronym for a major.
-Z
That bought me Sunday. If you guys had been down any longer I'd have been running around the streets naked. Please, please, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, get some redundancy.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
did s/he really think that the post was off-topic, or did s/he just want to say, "holy shit, I just modded down CmdrTaco. I 0wnz j00 t@c0!!!"
----
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
...let the smoke out of the wires again.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Where am I supposed to get my news??? I guess Slashdot got Slashdotted.
My hypothesis regarding monkeys and typewritters revolves around the concept of broken typewritters and smeared feces on
Hmm . . . I just figured somebody accidentally linked to slashdot.org in a Slashdot news story and the site finally Slashdotted itself.
I was going through slashdot withdraw. It has been a bad weekend for me. In-laws in town, slashdot down, can't check freshmeat down too, wanted to start working with mysql their site down too, and finally found out I was out of Mountain Dew last night while working on my box. I better have an explanation, Nick
AC comments get piped to
MOD this one up :)
---
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
You know, this reminds me of a time when I had a mallet, and this was a really great mallet that lots of other people liked. And then one day I lost my mallet, or it broke. I don't remember. But the funny thing was how heavy it felt.
This relates to Slashdot being down because a lot of people were also disappointed and bummed out when I lost my mallet.
-Karl /dos]# file msdos.sys
---------
[root@kgutwin
[root@kgutwin
msdos.sys: fsav (linux) virus (17518-87)
When I couldn't get my Slashdot, I assumed the worse. High-profile hijacking. Aliens beaming up the OSDN headquarters. Servers sneakily migrated to Windows, which then promptly crashed.
Kidding aside, I'm glad Slashdot is back up.
PANIC: Can't find
Which is also the quote at the bottom of MacSlash right now. Felt alot more like:
PANIC: Can't find
--Volrath50
When I stepped outside it looked like everything was being generated by 500,000,000 GeForce3s!!! The trees looked REAL!! It must have been at least 1,600,000,000 x 1,240,000,000!!! I couln't even see any jaggies! Talk about anti-ailiasing!!
After spending 2 days outside sue to lack of Slashdot it's hard to come back to my Power Mac 6100/60 with a 14" monitor at 640x480. I wish I had reality's 3D card...
And it seem's Slashdot has slashdotted itself. How did that happen??
--Volrath50
I mean who is this CmdrTaco guy and how the heck did he get UID #1???
It's obvious that this isn't the real Rob Malda, we all know that Slashdot editors NEVER post at Slashdot....
--Volrath50
From what I saw, it looked like most, if not all, of Andover went offline for a day, not just Slashdot. Any traffic I tried to send to any of Andover's network seemed to crap out in Exodus's territory.
This is not a Fugazi
You made a thread on nanog (thread index here.) Speculation there (and here) was that you'd either been a victim of an unusually Cisco-literate cracker who'd taken the entire netblock off the air, or you'd had finger trouble with some of the more fiendish BSD config files ;)
I hope you'll do the usual public post-mortem; looking forward to that.
traceroutes from the UK were dying somewhere well in side Exodus 64/8 space - well after the point that the hosts stopped having lookup-able names.
[1] DtG knows what I mean
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
What would happen to Slashdot if VA had to cut off funding? As it's not set up as a non-profit, it wouldn't be easy to just drop-in a community-supported infrastructure - volunteers to run the thing, a mixture of private and corporate donations from many sources to pay for hosting, bandwidth etc... just getting the voluntary infrastructure in place to *start* collecting sponsorship and donations would probably take months.
This has to be a Bad Thing.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
"Well, at first I thought that Microsoft had finally won the great and mythical prize, So I did what every mac lover/linux user would do, LOCK AND LOAD. I had just went over to Mapquest to find out how I could get to One Microsoft way, andthen it's back. Thank god. I didn't want to have to kill again" All joking aside, good to have you back, and may your uptime be as long as your burn rate.
Alas, poor clippy, I loath him so.
Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. We were making smores, using the excess heat generated by the improperly ventilated Cisco router, Saturday morning after finishing a 16 hour coding spree when all of a sudden CmdrTaco dropped his. The ohhh so gooey marshmello and yummy chocolate dripped into the air vents and all of a sudden the Cisco smoked and all the led's went out. Realizing there must be a fault, we promptly panacked and ran around the room screeming. but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it Our Cisco expert wasn't up to the task due to eating too many smores on a earlier coding break. Upon realizing this, we attempted to fix it ourselves by plugging it back in, but to no avail. We then called Cisco. Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online. Those great guys from Cisco, upon hearing of our predicament, instructed us to apply a half sinewave duration, several hundered newton, force laterally on the Cisco box using our lower right appenditure. Upon asking them "What the fuck are you talking about?" they replied "Kick the damn thing." Using extreme precision, we followed out their instructions and kicked the shit out of the box. Amazingly the thing reset itself and began working as usual. We suspect that the cause was a software bug, or a chocolate induced short circuit.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Let's see...
Does everyone here remember how quiet OSDN was when SourceForge was cracked?
Why do you think they'd be any different with Slashdot and Freshmeat (yes, both were down. However, sebastian.slashdot.org (AnimeFu) was up. How mysterious...)?
I'm still having problems accessing Slashdot now (it's very slow if it responds at all). Is it me, or does this sound like something a little bigger than a router failure?
Do you like German cars?
STFU.
It gets even stranger when, before the fix, I *could* access all three by using Safeweb, the program I use to bypass our proxy at work. I figured it was something with my ISP. But then Slashdot says it's a hardware problem on their end.
Oh well, at least I got to get outside for a bit. Course, being that it is Florida that meant 95 degree temps with feels like around 106, 100% humidity, followed by an approximate 3 degree drop before the sky opens up at the 'acts of nature and God' start flying.
Got my fix now, though, so guess I'll sleep.
Random Musings
I would like it if you guys could e-mail us when uknew it goes down. I was about to destroy the only net-able pc in the house cuz it wouldn't access slashdot. then when i found out it wasnt this computer, I would destroy this computer even more.
Good thing that it was only the router, I thought that this site got slashdotted.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
Now c'mon guys, I thought I told you that an old percolating coffee maker doesn't make a good router? Use an auto-drip next time.....
Gathering data from your May 2nd demographic evauation, Im thinking that you nearly lost five percent of your readers in the space of forty five minutes.
Yours in disappointment,
Australianus Geekus
Well, I'm glad /.'s back!
-
Gangis M. Khan
Unofficial Chrono Trigger 2 project
http://www.uct2.net
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
It can't be a coincidence that I've been reading up on old BOFH stories while /. was down... Maybe Simon did have something to do with this. ;-)
karma capped
Slashdot got slashdoted!
Seems fitting after the hundred of other sits that got temp killed due to slashdot stories.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Are there any pics of the melted router?
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
can i have that girl's phone number?
I'm sure if it had been a man they would have used the pronoun he instead of she. Oh My, Does the sexism never end? I'm having trouble spoiting the sexism in the following sentance:
When our qualified support person came along we discovered he wasn't as qualified as we thought he was, then he quit.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
In one of the Red Hat Database stories recently, someone was wondering (and quite honestly, I wonder too) exactly how Slashdot is able to work at all, considering that it runs on MySQL (known for easily dying under load) and Apache 1.* (known for fork()ing like a motherforker). After a while I started to wonder if we weren't being proved right... oh well.
So the Ciscos died? Heh. And your Cisco Certified Professional didn't know what to do? Well, that's really surprising. No, I really mean it. After all, those people have to pass like three tests in order to gain their prestigious title. I remember how stressed out my cat, Kyoto, was when she became Cisco Certified.
Incidentally, is the impending death of VA Linux cutting into your support costs? Lemme guess try and reconstruct this...
Cue "Wayne's World" dream sequence
Is that accurate, Rob?Diddlidoodlydo! Diddlidoodlydo! Diddlidoodlydo...
Kathleen
--
Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Kathleen
--
Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Yes.
... my application for employment at Slashdot :P
Taco Bell food always seems to do the trick...
What - sizewise or floatwise? What is it that determines "float" or "sink"? I mean, other than specific gravity in relation to the bowl water. Ratio of fat/water?
BTW, I saw a septic service tanker truck the other day that said "Floater (r)" on the side. I almost wet myself. But then, I'm easily amused. Oh, and thanks for sharing.
DoC
"Crikey! It's a Floater!" - Austin Powers, TSWSM
like BBC and CBC...how dare you let /. go down!!!
-OR_BraveHeart "there's nothing certain in life except death and taxes"
Having 10 years at building co-lo's and internet backbones all I can say is.. Who every design your setup should be shot. A single router going down should not bring everything down. It is a flawed design - Period. Try this: 2 uplinks (different providers) to 2 routers (BGP with own ASN and IP space) using VRRP (HSRP in the Cisco world) to 2 switches to many webservers. This is damn simple people. Use remote managed powersupplies (APC) and a console server with a dial-in to it (Cisco 2511RJ or hey how about a linux box with an async card!?!). Worse case if one of the routers gets in some way that it can not be failed via VRRP then you can just remote power it off!! This is not even that costly!! If it was a software change issue - try change control... Just my 2 cents...
Friggin POME's. If you were worth your salt, we'd have you in America's attic: Canada!
________________________________________________
if it would have been a man, "miss thang", the pronoun would have been something like, hmm, i donno, "KnuckleFUCK." (Thanks for that one from the other submission, btw, I like it :) )
Get a life or find a man, geez.
________________________________________________
I thought I lost you guys! :)
I almost left my computer because you guys were offline--think of the horror!!! I might have seen another human being!! Or worse...that so-called 'sky'...
ALL HAIL SLASHDOT! SLASHDOT IS GOD!
*goes back to her slashdot alter* Well, I am glad to have you guys back
I am Jack's creative sig.