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Amazon has just launched a pretty cool service for those of its AWS customers who have large amounts of data that they want to upload to Amazon S3: AWS Import/Export. It’s essentially what used to be called a sneakernet, i.e. you can just mail your data on hard drives to Amazon via snail mail instead of sending it over the Internet.
Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.
We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.
IPv6 adoption is going so slow that it has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet. Three years from now there will be no IPv4 address space left. IPv6 needs to be fully adopted by then, but currently only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6.
This for a process that was expected to be done by 2007.
When it comes to the ability to do damage to a company, few employees have more power than sysadmins. Deep system access and inside knowledge is a necessary part of their job, but when things go bad between employee and employer, some very sensitive situations can arise.
Here are six real-world cases of “sysadmins gone wild” that all ended up in court.
The ever-popular Slashdot was unreachable for over an hour last evening due to massive amounts of traffic hitting its network. Normally Slashdot is known for bringing other sites down with the traffic it generates (the so-called Slashdot effect, or slashdotting).
We thought it was time for some fun of the geekier kind. If you know what IPv6 is, this should be something for you.
You may have seen IPv6 addresses that contain a couple of actual words. Here is a made-up example: babe:f432:42aa:8271:eee6:1076:dead:beef
Now what if we take this one step further, and construct entire sentences inside IPv6 addresses instead of just a few words? We decided to do just that, and here is how we did it.
CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are becoming increasingly popular. The obvious benefit is that they can help websites to give end users a speedier web surfing experience, but there is also another very positive side effect for the entire Internet, and it will become more noticeable the more common CDNs become.
The positive side effect is this: More CDN usage means less load on the Internet backbone.
Why? It all comes down to how most CDNs work.
The social network site LinkedIn had two hour-long outages last week, one on Thursday and one on Sunday.
The first outage, on November 13 at 10:06 p.m. EST, lasted one hour and five minutes. According to a message displayed on the website the downtime was due to planned maintenance.
Ping is the favorite tool of network administrators for testing connectivity and response time over networks, but is there a limit to how fast response times can get? Of course there is. The answer is c. Ultimately response time over a network is limited by the speed of light. In a vacuum, light travels with [...]
Here are some recent interesting tidbits from around the web. They cover everything from servers submerged in oil (hopefully not for frying purposes), to MySpace drama and web 2.0 speculation. And of course Google had to show up. Don’t they always? Data Center Knowledge: Bathtub computing enters server halls Servers in oil sounds like something [...]
