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Surviving Slashdotting with a Small Server

Posted by michael on from the soon-to-be-an-oreilly-book dept.

S.BartFarst writes "Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived! Implementation of a two-headed redundant hardware scheme using linux virtual server and backup and failover capabilities enhanced by the linux high-availability tools has produced a nifty low-cost solution. Gotta love those little white boxes! (also having a university-supplied BIG PIPE doesn't hurt). More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters. Anybody else observed similar phenomena?"

11 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Third Time's a Charm? by sweeney37 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!

    Wait... is this a challenge?

    Mike

  2. Apparently... by yanbusa · · Score: 5, Funny

    They are asking for another test.

    --
    What's in a sig?
  3. Thou shall not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thou shall not survive thrice. You're insolence will not be tolerated. You'll servers will suffer a slashdotting not hence seen....

  4. A.D.D. crowd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters.

    Well, I was gonna reply, but I forgot what the post was about.

  5. Nope... by ryanvm · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anybody else observed similar phenomena?

    Nope. In our jobs they make us do work.

  6. The Slashdot worm. by caluml · · Score: 4, Funny

    Lets help them out.

    while :; do wget http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/venus/mpeg/atl a1.mpg -O /dev/null -o /dev/null ; done

    Don't forget to fix the space in the URL.

    --
    Get your own free personal location tracker
    1. Re:The Slashdot worm. by Pharmboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      i already posted mine before i saw yours. my solution was

      while true
      do
      wget --delete-after -m -p http://www.geology.smu.edu/
      done

      which has the advantage of not only hammering their bandwidth, but since it requests everything on the entire site, including images and many multiple mb files, then the server cant cache it all, and will have to read from the disk alot. also, since it deletes after downloading, it doesn't take up your precious drive space, lol.

      but nice to know another sick fucker had the same basic idea.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
  7. Testing, testing... by Mish · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're just begging for a 'real' test... ... such as everyone downloading this:

    ar405eng.exe (5.41 MB)

    from their webserver :p

    5.41MB per slashdot reader should provide a test worth of such a fat pipe ;)

  8. Re:Clever, clever by ashitaka · · Score: 4, Funny

    Feel sorry for them on Monday morning though...

    Monday morning!!?? You're kidding, right?

    They have already noticed the "exponentially decaying attention span" of Slashdotters.

    By Monday morning this story and the site will be relegated to un-clicked graveyard of "Older Stuff"

    --
    If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
  9. exponentially decaying attention span? by jazman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not sure how you get that from the graph. For myself, I didn't know what the subject matter was, so I opened the window, went "ugh, geology", and closed it more or less straight away. Ok, perhaps this proves the point - for subjects I'm not interested in I have a short attention span, but this doesn't mean I have a SAS for everything.

    You get an exponentially decaying number of hits, yes, but how many of those are people doing exactly what I did and not staying, as opposed to those who stay a while because they find geology interesting?

    The last time you were /.ted, did the graph decay at the same rate or did it take longer to go down? If it took longer that would suggest shortening ASs, but then did you have anything of special interest up at the time? Bung some pr0n up there and see if the, er, bulge is a different shape.

  10. Re:Clever, clever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Commander Taco will repost it on Tuesday....