Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot.org Self-Slashdotted
Slashdot.org was unreachable for about 75 minutes this evening. Here is the post-mortem from Sourceforge's chief network engineer Uriah Welcome. "What we had was indeed a DoS, however it was not externally originating. At 8:55 PM EST I received a call saying things were horked, at the same time I had also noticed things were not happy. After fighting with our external management servers to login I finally was able to get in and start looking at traffic. What I saw was a massive amount of traffic going across the core switches; by massive I mean 40 Gbit/sec. After further investigation, I was able to eliminate anything outside our network as the cause, as the incoming ports from Savvis showed very little traffic. So I started poking around on the internal switch ports. While I was doing that I kept having timeouts and problems with the core switches. After looking at the logs on each of the core switches they were complaining about being out of CPU, the error message was actually something to do with multicast. As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet. Luckily we don't have any machines deployed on [that row in that cabinet] yet so no machines are offline. The network came back up around 10:10 PM EST."
Now if you could just post the link to the form where I can claim my full refund (for time not wasted incurred) I'll go back to being a loyal "customer".
I record my sleeptalking
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot slashdots Slashdot!
probably the biggest proof that Slashdot has become sentient is that is willing to suicide self before seeing again another batch of Idle videos.
Any day you get to legitimately use "horked" in a public post can't be all bad. :P
The problem was the system was HORKED, didn't you get that?
The switches were running Windows 7 Starter Edition. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/09/1348255
The year is 2025.
Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, here you see what you may think is an archaic lot of old computers. You would be mistaken. These are Slashdot. No, no cause for alarm...and that door's locked anyway, you can't get out through there. The tour only goes forward. But I'm glad at the very least that you know what Slashdot is. Not was. IS.
It's a safeguard against...something. Something that was unleashed for 75 minutes in 2009 that crippled what was rumored to be the most robust public-facing cluster known. All we have left from that fateful day is the single post from the Slashdot network admin. Someone archived it, lucky us, because he was never seen after that day. I have a copy here, hardcopy of course -- no sense in taking risks so close to...well....
Here it is:
I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something. I just don't know what yet.
Is it possible the duplicate article generator tried to spawn, became entangled in its own potential well of duplicity, and now is trapped like two Lisp programmers deep inside their parenthesis?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Indeed. Studies show that you're far more likely to get hacked if you keep a computer in your home. Indeed it's often even a case where an attacker is able to wrest control of your own computer from you and use it against you.
At the very minimum, given the elevated hazard potential to kids (over 90% of kids will suffer a computer accident before the age of 18), you should always keep your computers and networking equipment securely locked in separate compartments.
I'm not going to go so far as you and call for an outright ban, but I think it's obvious that we need common-sense computer control laws put into place. In particular, we need to stop the widespread smuggling of these devices from across the borders of places such as Taiwan, Japan, and California, into our outer-city suburbs.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Quis slashdotiet ipsos slashdotes?
Mirror
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Act as a data source to Excel.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It may be strange for those not in the networking field, but when things really go bad, the only place to be is physically in the data center.
Heh. I've heard that in the old day you could find broken Token ring hardware by listening after a high pitched whining noise. Guess one really has to be there for stuff like that.
Was there, and confirm true. Whining noise normally came from IBM SE who was trying to fix problem.