Had a moment of clarity on Friday afternoon…….. (Warning, geek content to follow).
It occurred to me while I was mumbling under my breath about my flakey web site that quite often the browser was throwing up the “cant find beno.id.au” thing way too fast……. It was like it could not even find me……
Ahhhh, perhaps its not. So, I hit up my DNS server host……… Afraid.
This guy has been great. I have been using him for about 6-8 years now.
Its been free for me all this time, and I honestly never really think about it all that much. My Linksys router has had its OS replaced with a Linux version (Tomato), and it supports Afraid for dynamid DHCP, which Time Warner use.
So I never have to worry about my IP address changing and I never have to worry about my domain name resolving to said IP address.
That is, until the last week and a bit.
When I went to the news section of Afraid, I found what I was looking for.
In case you are reading this long after the event, here is a cut and past of the news from Friday;
| 2010-07-16 15:03:46 |
| A user of afraid.org had a domain that around 7:30 AM PST came under attack, with many gigabits of malicious traffic at its peak directed to all afraid.org DNS servers. The attack is still in progress at the time of this writing, but has been reduced significantly.
While attacks are not that unusual for afraid.org, they are generally not this large as today. Unfortunately – this exhausted every ounce of resource available for afraid.org, and caused serious disruption for the site afraid.org, and for innocent bystanders sites that are also using afraid.org for their own sites. So, after today’s eventful morning, I will be taking further measures to protect users by increasing the available nameserver pool size from 4, to at minimum 64, and begin allocating configurations to members in a way that minimizes overlapping configurations as much as possible. Over time I have observed that much of the human based problematic events such as this one comes from (a relatively small set of) unpaid members, it is a sad truth. I will not stop providing the free portion of the service, but I am strongly leaning toward moving paid members to their own tier of servers. While afraid.org has not had a problem of this kind in a while, I’m going to reflect on this event and take measures to make the site better because of it. |
So, we found the mystery to my woes. I really am annoyed with myself, I really should have figured this, or at least included it in my tests a lot quicker than I did. I really am getting rusty over here (thats more than enough out of you Gary, I hope you split your drink from laughing!)
So, the bottom line it, I cant complain as I am getting it for free. The obvious thing is to see if paying for it would protect me from this sort of thing in the future or not. A few days of hit and miss every 6 years, is it really worth it? Is this sort of attack on his servers going to be come more common? Some of these questions I am not sure I am ever going to get answers to.
Bottom line. Least it was not something at my end. I have to be honest, I really was getting tempted to point the finger at Windows 7. It was the one thing I changed, and I am having hit and miss issues with my photo album, one moment it will change a photo, next it wont. I really cant get to the bottom of THAT one so I thought it might be a small indicator of bigger things.
Anyway, bottom bottom line, I am still going to take the site down for about 1/2 hour tonight to remove a hard drive from the current server PC.
That drive will then go into Terrys computer and will be formatted and have Linux installed. I will move the web site over to that PC (ie, my original one). Once the site is up and running I will swap the IP addresses and we will be back running on Linux. That will only take about 1 minute for that one.
I am hopeful that this will be it for another 6-8 years. Both Freddy and I are getting sick of all this shuffling and not having things working. Once this (last) shuffle is done, we are hopeful that 98% of things will be back up and running and the last 2% (I suspect that it will be the sharing of drives and data between windows and linux again) that is left hanging, I will just battle through it.
