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When Does Website Monitoring Go Too Far?
"Though I believe they are a reputable company, they are doing some things I do not think are good: checking for the domain names on the TLD servers once per second, downloading various files from the site once per second, and sending email to themselves once per second.
Our first response was to talk to them and explain what we needed them to do, including a list of IPs that we used for customers so they could adjust their monitoring to suit what we thought was reasonable. They chose to ignore the first discussion and continued to abuse the servers. After the email server required a half-day of cleanup, the CTO simply shut them off at the firewalls. Rather than using the contact information they had, they chose to complain to our mutual customers instead. (I should note we do significant monitoring of the servers ourselves, and typically know if something is wrong within minutes of the event.)
Is this typical behavior of monitoring service companies? I know some of them are not reputable at all (due to spamming) however these guys seem to know what they are doing, and yet managed to effectively attack our mail and web servers, as well as doing some things I would not do to the TLD servers. It is hard to feel justified to shutting off someone else's cash-flow, but at the same time we need to defend servers from over zealous monitoring."
They must be a way to enforce that they could check, say, only once every hour. And BTW, isn't your company missing an opportunity here? If you're already checking the servers, etc., why not make the tools available to the customers? They'll be more satisfied with the tools, and not having to pay the outside firm. You'll have more satisified customers and less churn....
Don't give a company of strangers the key to the front door. There's no reason someone from your company wasn't there to say 'when.' As for when too much is too much, it'd be when the efficiency of your main product is impaired to the point that you lose customers or reputation.
Banaaaana!
A server should not choke if the log partition is full. Is the log in a separate partition, isn't it?
Their 'harvesting' your IP block is tacky at the least. That said, the current range of InternetSeer type monitoring is flat out overkill, and doesn't even work right half the time. According to some of them, my site is constantly down, but it *never* is. I know, since I'm an access_log nerd and always play with it; people are always going through it without any large 'dead' blocks appearing. All you need is a remote monitoring system to let you know when your major ports aren't functional, and to have it mail you ONLY when it's down. These 100k emails dripping with HTML to let you know that your site is still up are a complete waste of good bandwidth. Ping your damn site on your major ports, and that's all you need.
Dude, where's my packet?
They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers.
Sounds like you've got an open and shut legal case to recoup those costs they're causing you to incur.
NO CARRIER
Let's all pitch in on a little scheme. We will each agree to buy a service plan to have one non-existant .com web site monitored. If we could get lots of people to do this, we could DDOS Verisign off the internet!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Nagios.
http://www.nagios.org/
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
When it exceeds the point of being far enought!
Kind of depends on how rapidly you can respond to a problem with something being monitored - obviously every second or even every minute is too rapid. Every hour sounds better.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
...that either don't have the time / money to go after people like this, such as the webhotel I'm involved in in my sparetime, I'd recommend firewalling. Simply block all incoming connections from over zealous monitor-companies.
Ofcourse this doesn't do anything to fix the bad reputation they may have given you by flooding your servers, but its a quick and easy antidote against future problems.
From your description, i.e. "Once per second", that is quite beyond monitoring, and that is an EXCESSIVE use of bandwidth and resources.
Now, if you charge your customers based on gigs transferred, it seems like this would fill up their quota for the month quite quickly. What are your customers going to think when they get a large overcharge bill for the bandwidth? They signed up for the service after all.
If you aren't hosting for money, then you probably aren't able to profit from this monitoring companies actions in the same way, so I suggest you blackhole their ip's. Downloading files from your server once per second goes way beyong monitoring, and into the realms of denial of service(It crashed your server you say).
What I would do? Make a change to the aup for your service stating that customers that use monitoring services that abuse bandwidth will have their accounts revoked, or be charge for the excess bandwidth used. There's no reason in the world why these people need to hit your servers as often as they are.
If you are unable to do business with your servers being hammered, then I suggest blackholing the monitoring service's IP's. It's only sensible.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
we typically set our monitor software to check every 5 minutes, with one request PER SERVER not per site. if it is down it will send an email to our support address, if it is STILL down the second time around, it fires off an email to the cell phone of the on-duty admin, plus one email when it comes back up
i've had some services set up for monitoring as low as 30 seconds, but those are specific cases.
obviously a 1 seconds check is WAY too low, not only it's a waste of bandwidth, it's prone to false positives. what happen when you have a slight delay in one of the core routers that cause your packet to get dropped/delayed by 1000ms ?
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Here's a common sense reaction.
They are in the business of measuring Net availability. They should learn to set the scale on their instruments before they connect them to the circuit. And they should back off when availability drops because they might be the cause of the drop. If their traffic represents more than about 10x that caused by an individual customer, then as a "juror" I'd think they were being irresponsible.
You are in the business of supplying Net availability. You should install circuit breakers. Too many connection from one host/network? Start dropping packets. Too much raw incoming traffic from one source? Get on the horn quickly to the netadmin.
Your customers don't care who's at fault, they want what they paid for. But they can't expect miracles.
And I can tell you that if they're polling at 1 a second of *anything*, they don't "know what they're doing". That is complete overkill, there's no way the amount of bandwidth being used for testing is worth the 59-second jump on knowing what went wrong. Humans generally have to react to it, that kind of resolution is just crazy.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Okay so you're telling me that a 3rd party company is contacting your web customers and selling them monitoring services that you already provide and some other services that you may or may not provide. They then begin to access your system to do said monitoring but it's crashing your servers.
:)
Lets put it this way.
You provide your customers a service. Part of that user agreement (This is doubly important in a shared server enviroment) that the customer cannot install any software/script/service that impacts the performance of the servers beyond what you say they can. Even the act of using 3rd party monitoring that is causing this problem is in violation of your AUP your customers are contractually binded to. Now I cant see your AUP but I hope there are provisions in there stating this.
Now as far as the 3rd party company goes. You need to have your legal department file a cease letter to them with a explanation of the problems they're causing and until things can be worked out they are not permitted to conduct business across your network.
You also need to notify your customers the actions you're taking on this company and why. Also pointing out your AUP/SLA's with them and the un acceptable behavior of the company that was selling them services. Tell them what you can monitor and explain what they really need.
In the assumption of a web/email then all you need to do is monitor the ports and maybe a script that will verify the email server is accepting connections on a minute basis. That's all you need for that setup. Also if they're allowed to telnet into the box (SSH I hope) then you'd also monitor the SSH port as well to ensure they can connect to their equipment.
If you're co-locating: Then I would suggest getting a Nagios setup running and sell some sort of monitoring to your customers. A good example would be the system that springboardhosting.com provides to their users. We use them as our colo partner and I've had no complaints. Though we only use the basic monitoring I do have advanced tools at the house and my laptop should I feel I need to watch any critical services. And I use webmin to monitor peer servers and page my phone in case there are any problems.
You're in a pickle at the moment but I think your customers will appreciate cutting off the source of the outages. Nobody needs to know if their service is up by the second unless it's some sort of huge database application and then you'd have special provisions to monitor it and not remotely.
That company is basically DDOS'g your servers to death. So it's basically them or you. I think the choice is simple
Hope that helps.
From a business perspective, monitoring is a service *you* should offer to your customers. Since it is your network, you have the ability to provide a much more effective and accurate monitoring service, and can set the resolution of the service according to your customers needs. All the problems you describe are because they are operating from the outside. What that monitoring service is effectively doing is stealing your bandwidth, and selling to your customers. If you want to get your lawyers involved, send them a C&D since they are affecting your ability to conduct business. personally I would firewall then as the CTO has done, and offer the same service internally.
A couple of years ago, a so-called "security expert" sold the president of my company on the idea of installing a firewall.
To some extent, that was fine with me. I'd been arguing for that for a very long time but had gotten nowhere because the "security expert" said that firewalls weren't necessary! I guess someone finally bothered to break into his system.
The security expert's idea was to have a third party monitoring company do it all. So I spent a couple hours on the telephone one day talking to the monitoring company's personnel about our network requirements and traffic. We went into great detail over exactly which servers had to handle which services.
The firewall arrived and the security expert plugged it in. It didn't work at all. All it did was block everything. I was 600 miles away at the time and it took me a week to convince them to take it off.
They decided the firewall was defective and the monitoring company set up another one. By the time it arrived, I was back in the office. The big day came and the security expert had one of his employees come out and plug it in.
It didn't work at all.
I caught the employee of the so-called security expert before he could leave the building and had him remove it. The idiot didn't even bother to check to see if it was working.
After he left the building, I started looking at how he had it plugged in. He still had a cable plugged into the firewall from an internal hub.
He had connected the untrusted side of the firewall to the internal network. I assume that the cable from the Cisco router was plugged into the trusted side of the firewall.
But it really didn't make much difference. I also found the rule set for the firewall. The monitoring company had set it to pass nearly everything in both directions.
The only thing they configured was to block incoming traffic containing our IP addresses. Since it was plugged in backwards, it really just stopped all traffic from going out.
At this point, it would take a lot of convincing to get me to advocate using a monitoring company's services.
By the way, the same so-called "security expert" declared that rules on the Cisco router to block traffic attempting to connect to port 135 and other similar ports constituted a security list and removed them.
Your system should have been set up to attribute the log file to the disk space of each client, causing them to eventually hit their limit and lose their abilty to log any further. No set of requests from the outside world should be able to bring down your server short of a vicious DOS attack, which clearly this wasn't. This was a an overload level of legit traffic, if your server can't handle it then you need a better server.
:)
You should be able to create a few new services and convince your clients that they don't need to pay a 3rd party to monitor their server, that you can tell them all they need to know, and besides that you don't go down anyway.
It would have been an absoulte fiasco if one of your customers were to attract a Slashdotting...
It seems there has been an unusual amount of downtime to your web and email servers. Probable cause: we over monitored them. Sorry.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
First things first. These are your servers. Your network. I am assuming you have the standard abuse clause in your TOS. You need a lawyer.
Unfortunately, you are in a bad situation. They apparently have more resources than you, because they can bring your setup to it's knees. Not saying it's right, not saying it's fair.
A lookup of your TLDs each second makes sense if you are Yahoo! or Google. Their web monitoring levels don't appear to be reasonable. You already know the technical answer.
Personally, I would be worried about them stealing your customers. I mean the argument is going to be simple from their side. They will simply say, "hey look, their stuff folded under 'normal' monitoring, we have a hosting company we can 'recommend'" or they will just have the hosting company call them up out of the blue and ask if they are "unhappy" with thier current service..."oh, it goes down a lot"..."they can't handle simple monitoring"..."gee, that's a shame"..."well, we've worked with that monitoring company before, and we have never had any problems, in fact we routinely get 5 9s"...etc
Honestly, talk to legal, explain the potential situation, and have them make contact with the monitoring company. A couple of tortious interference this, and cease and desist that, will put the monitoring company on it's toes and maybe get them to leave your customers alone, or possible play nice with your servers. Notify your customers yourself and explain that they are being investigated by your legal team, etc.
No.
These guys don't know what they're doing if they are banging on your servers every second. It is a strategy that is bound to make any competent admin irate and probably break things. Anything more than once-a-minute is probably overkill. Once every 5 minutes is a good window for most things. Your people are quite entitled to block them at the firewall.
Your sales people have to figure out how to appease the customers. That's their job. You are a tech and you'll just foul things up using tools like fairness and logic. I've been there.
Lastly, if they overflowed your log partition, you aren't monitoring enough things. It isn't enough to make sure that your sites are up, you need to make sure that the disks they depend on have enough free space, that the servers they run on don't have unnacceptible load spikes, etc... Comprehensive solutions are hard, but quick-and-dirty solutions aren't. Remember though that it's hard to send pages from a dead server and design accordingly.
Monitoring your servers is a security function. A security company should strive to appear beyond reproach. Wether they got your customer list by looking through your ip logs or from a former employee, that is unsuitable behavior. I would contact my customers tell them that a security firm you do business with has "acquired" a customer list of yours and you are unsure of their intentions but you are sure that they acquired it dishonestly. None of your customers will hire them. The down side is, be careful not to tell your customers in a way that makes you look stupid, because you might look it.
It seems to me that unless your company signed some kind of waiver in case their monitoring did any damage, you have a case for negligence.
Even with a waiver, generally, you can't waive somebody's negligence. Their actions sound negligent in that they used excessive resources such that your servers crashed.
Additionally, it sounds like there may be some form of defamation claim when they complained to your customer base about you. Though defamation claims, especially slander (spoken defamation), are thorny claims that can be hard to prove, it sounds like you may have a number of incidents that may show intentional defamation (much better when seeking damages).
I think, at the very least, your general counsel should be asking for compensation for your downtime.
-A
They either got a hold of a customer list from a former employee or walked our IP space to find our web hosting customers. They then proceeded to sell them monitoring services for things such as server up-time, defacement detection, email up-time and DNS testing.
In other words, they upsold your customers without your consent. That in itself it unethical and any thought in my mind that this is a 'reputable' company would go away at that point.
You go on to describe how they DoS'd your boxes, and complained to your customers when you took action to protect your customers from the DoS attack.
If their behavior is really as you described, why are you bending over backwords to say how reputable and legitimate they are? They are neither.
This is not legal advice. Find a lawyer, ask them what to do.
It seems as though you've got a tort of negligence on your hands, insofar as they seem unaware, or oblivious to, the damages they are causing you. They do not seem, from your statements, to be wilfully causing damages, but negligence torts need not show (at least in the commonwealth) either wilfulness or intent. You need only show damages, which are an indirect consequence of their actions.
Take into account that torts are, by most accounts, very expensive, though the threat of a tort is often sufficient, or binding arbitration (though that is apparently not oft met with success), or mediation (same deal as binding arbitration). If you do have to litigate, the general rule is somewhere north of $100,000 in damages to justify the transaction cost, from what I have heard. See the first line, though - find a lawyer.
In the least you can establish damages in support of a trespass if you inform them that their actions cause damage, in which case their actions are thereafter wilful, which may make for a cleaner case. The onus in trespass is on the defendent (them) to defend against damages established, not the plaintiff (you); and whereas in negligence, the onus is on the plaintiff (you) to show damages.
Ok, so in gist, take everything I said with a grain of salt, and seek legal counsel. Your jurisdiction may have many options with respect to small claims or public dispute resolution, and I would suggest those because they are significantly cheaper.
Hope that helps.
Charge for it. Notify yer customer (by perl of course *tee hee*) that their logs are causing their account to approach its space limit. They can either move the logs, delete the logs, stop the logging software or remove the logging software. Warn them that if this is not taken care of additional hd space fees will apply.
Make sure they know that cleaning up logs should be *cough* easy and pain free!
There should be no reason to add 3rd party security IF your security is in place. There are a lot of ways to protect your environment that do not require outside monitoring.
Alert your users of this fact - send them all an E-mail to alert them of this scam!
You run the show -- not some 3rd party. You set the rules and the security policies. You do the monitoring internally.
I can't believe that monitoring consumed 15GB of space. There's something else going on there. I helped work on a data warehouse to capture all of Worldcoms routers data every 5 minutes -- every router's SNMP logs and for years dumped all that data into an Oracle database so we could report on it. That's a bunch of routers and a ton of data. For your company to consume that much log data in a single weekend doesn't make sense.
Block the 3rd party polling IP at the routers and do the job internally.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
If I understand you right:
1. You have some customers to which you sell services such as email and web space.
2. Some of these customers contracted this monitoring service to watch the servers.
3. The monitoring service caused problems with your servers.
And the answer is:
Correct your hosting contract. Your hosting contract should include provisions for how much usage is reasonable and how the situation will be handled when the customer's usage exceeds those parameters. If the customer insists on doing something stupid which brings the server to its knees, then the customer should pay you enough for you to be able to afford a seperate server for them.
If the sales force insisted that they'd lose sales by bothering the customer with such notions, now would be an excellent time to point out that they just lost sales because they didn't.
As to how much monitoring is too much, the answer is simple: anything the customer is willing to pay for is fine. Anything more is too much.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It's a DoS attack on your systems and should be treated as such (especially as you warned them already and they ignored you).
Block them off and take them to court.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
If they're letting their logs get huge before rotating them it would cause a problem every time the server tries to append data at the end of the file.
And they shouldn't be keeping the logs on the server anyway. It's static data that only they could need access to. It should be moved off site to a standard IDE harddrive for processing.
Statistical data should be created as the data comes in and not from the log files if they intend to let the customers have statistics for whatever.
As for my own site, I have Apache doing the combined log format and wrote custom software to process and analyze the data. Every month I move the log off the server and every 10 megs or so I rotate the logs and move the data into a second cumulative file that Apache doesn't work off of.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
It is very important for a bigger hosting firm to have a good moniroting strategy which shows trhe external perspective.
The timing need not be more than 15 minutes in most cases. The plan should include the network, web server and applications, and possibly supporting servers such as email or DNS.
The external capabilities are critical - if you are going to do external, use a firm who has profressional managed remote stations in many places.
Tim Goeke
http://www.globalnetwatch.com
Why are you putting up with this crap?
As several posters have already mentioned, firewall them off, and then report them to the legal authorities.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ! They are attacking your network. I feel like flaming the original poster for his incompetence. Acquire the BOFH nature. After you firewall them, file a report with the FBI's cybercrime division. Tell them you are a hosting company, and you have the IP of someone who is costing your company $BIGNUM dollars per day because they are DOS-ing your network. That should keep this "monitoring company" busy for a while, and it will teach them a lesson.
Whining about it on slashdot is the last thing you should be doing. Get a clue.
Ha, tell that to all the webmasters with non-compliant HTML out there.
I just thought of a good idea, a web page upload form or something which scans the webpages which gives a nice little dialog about a webpage being non compliant, and may not display correctly in many browsers :) Now to get ANY ISP to implement it... HA!
"Oh dear God! You've been pinged! The sky is falling!! Whew. It's a damn good thing you installed our over-priced over-hyped personal firewall thingy because we just saved your ass!"
Think I'm kidding? Don't. These ass clowns prey on guilible users that simply don't know any better. It's just like what many auto repair shops do to those people whom they don't think know jack about cars.
The belt on your carburetor are about to break. We also had to grease you exhaust bearings and reprogram your warp convertors. That'll be $700 please.
If only we can eliminate stupid people and those that would prey on them (including the media) the world would be a much better place.
ok ok...about the only thing I find remotley factual in this article is the fact that this guy works for a 'company'...however it looks like he works for a company doing exactly the things he is asking about.
First of all, lack of any knowledge of partion or disk utilities to prevent such an occurance is unacceptable. I would not admit that in public about my company even if I used the phrase 'a company I work for', just on the off chance my negligence would be able to be tracked back to me.
Second, why are you not able to offer these services yourself? You make a claim that these people know what they are doing, so if you are at such a level to recognise what they are doing, how come you havent done it already? Did customer service become just a novelty to you? so I doubt this line very much... While I welcome anything that lets our customers use the internet effectively
Doing hosting myself, Im well aware of the tactics you speak of, being that I get bounce mail for nonexistant addresses sent to such titles as; president, ceo, owner, support, tech...and so on. And Im not sure exactly what you mean by 'choked up' your mail server. How do 40k NONEXISTANT addresses manage to slow down your mail server? Is it a 286?
The whole article just smells funny to me, as it seems like you are just pretending to care about the ISP's end and more concerned about the backlash of doing these things. What do you mean how far is to far? Again, if the people in charge cant figure these things out on their own, I would be very hesitant to admit that in a public forum.
Get your technical skills and decision making in line...THEN question how to outsource it..
"Though I believe they are a reputable company, they are doing some things I do not think are good: checking for the domain names on the TLD servers once per second, downloading various files from the site once per second, and sending email to themselves once per second.
They are not a reputable company. They are a bunch of retards who should be driven out of the industry with sharp sticks. More to the point, they should be reported to the FBI for conducting a malicioius attack against your network - and you have tangible damage to prove it.
Our first response was to talk to them and explain what we needed them to do, including a list of IPs that we used for customers so they could adjust their monitoring to suit what we thought was reasonable. They chose to ignore the first discussion and continued to abuse the servers. After the email server required a half-day of cleanup, the CTO simply shut them off at the firewalls. Rather than using the contact information they had, they chose to complain to our mutual customers instead. (I should note we do significant monitoring of the servers ourselves, and typically know if something is wrong within minutes of the event.)
Is this typical behavior of monitoring service companies? I know some of them are not reputable at all (due to spamming) however these guys seem to know what they are doing, and yet managed to effectively attack our mail and web servers, as well as doing some things I would not do to the TLD servers. It is hard to feel justified to shutting off someone else's cash-flow, but at the same time we need to defend servers from over zealous monitoring."
Here's a hint for you: Do they offer web hosting services themselves? You may have to dig real deep to find the connection, but if I had to guess, I'll bet they do. And I'll bet they offer it to your customers, based on the fact that they crashed your servers. "Your current service seems to have a lot of downtime. Perhaps you should consider moving to another host. We can make recommendations."
If you find any evidence that they offer any kind of competition to your hosting, report them to the FBI. They may well be a criminal organization engaging in a well orchestrated scam.
Or maybe they're just fucking stoopid. It's hard to tell from here.
One of the biggest problems with monitoring something is that you inevitably affect it, a la Heisenberg in the Physics world. The more closely you try to monitor something, the more you affect it. This is a basic principle of monitoring.
The solution to this is simple. Publish the web address of this loser monitoring company and we'll let Slashdotters "check the integrity of their system."
$ units bits/second bits/day
* 86400
So you're looking at (roughly) 100K hits per day per file downloaded per site. If they're downloading 15 files per site, and you've got 100 sites on the box, then you're looking at an increase of about 120 million requests per day. My acess log has an average of 200bytes/er line, so you're now looking at 120Mrequests*200bytes/request == a sudden jump of 24gigabytes of logging per day.
Then you've got the effective mail-bombing to deal with.
The article author said that these people sounded like they know what they're doing, so that leaves (in my mind), two likely possibilities:
- They're really really good snow-job artists. They understand the terminology, but they have no real sense of methodology or purpose.
- They really do know what they're doing, and they're trashing your servers with intent.
I mean -- for crying out loud: Multiple files once per second? And just how long did it take them to inform your customers that they'd managed to crash the servers? Monitoring granularity of more than about one quarter the normal notification time is a complete waste of resources -- and that's giving them lots of leeway to waste.And Tens of thousands of undelivered emails??? If those emails didn't get delivered, then what did the company do when they didn't arrive in short order? Why didn't they stop the transmission and diagnose why the emails weren't coming thru? If the emails really are undeliverable, then how in the world did you manage to conclude that they know what they're doing?
Other notes (mostly mentioned elsewhere)
-
are you charging your customers based on their net volume? If so, have you informed your customers of what sort of costs these, uhm, people are imposing on them in addition to their monitoring fees?
- I'm guessing that your AUP includes a clause on activities that wilfully or negligently cause inappropriate server load, outages, etc. I think that this company's "services" classifies.
- I think that you had better seriously consider possibility #2 above. Meticulously document what they've done to your servers (including somehow scamming your customer list). Have that information ready to present to your customers and/or a judge. If all goes well, you won't need it, but I'm not expecting all to go well, given how they've gone so far.
One last point -- Even though you may be dealing with a company that you think has a (otherwise) good reputation, doesn't mean that you're not dealing with an inept department of an otherwise good company. Sometimes the VP Engineering puts his/her stupid cousin in some group where they're not likely to do much damage, and then finds out that the goofball has managed to get out 'in the wild' with a 'bright' idea.Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I work for a large hosting company. We have a lot of customers who have monitoring companies monitor their websites (we actually use some). We obviously monitor our services ourselves, but it is not always objective doing this. Having said that, monitoring once per second is *stupid*, generally 5 minutes is appropriate and we monitor some things internally every 60 seconds. We charge for bandwidth and disk usage (including logs), so if people want to monitor every second, go for it, your credit card will get dinged next month. For a smaller provider, I can see this being a problem, I would blackhole the IP. It is a DOS attack and I'm pretty sure you would have the legal right to do that. You do have a provision in your policies that you can take necessary action to protect your network, right? We do and will use it when necessary. Right after 9/11, we had a *very* popular and large image on our servers (the "eagle", if anyone has seen it). We "chmod 0"'d it and called the customer. They didn't realize what happened (getting so many hits), understood (once we explained bandwidth charges), and where happy we did it. Monitoring every 5 minutes is reasonable and will catch almost all outages.
I meant VERISIGN and not Verio
And SITEFINDER instead of seeker. dammit
Now why didn't i pressed preview ?
Cricket.
http://cricket.sourceforge.net/
Microsft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!!
How about partitioning your servers properly so they don't crash when they fill the logs?
Basic sysadmin 101, people. You're going to piss off customers by doing what the parent suggests.
Please help metamoderate.
Admin-on-the-street says "I need a job, you insensitive clod"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Note: OP means the monitoring company with "they". Pissing off your customers by telling them that they themselves are under legal investigation is a kind of SCO idea...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.