Just to let you know what is happening on the net. Dave Wells dwells@zekes.com Listowner: WELLS-L@rootsweb.com Listowner: HOWE-L@rootsweb.com Proud RootsWeb Sponsor > As many of you have undoubtably noticed, the last week has been a > mess out on The Net. > > Starting one week ago, some clown has been strobing all the hosts > and routers on the Internet with an attack that is fatal (locks the > machine such that it has to be power cycled to restart) to Win 95 > and Win NT boxen. > > While this didn't directly affect RootsWeb (we're wall-to-wall Unix > servers), it did kill one of our network neighbors' NT server. > Unfortunately that NT server was providing reverse DNS for some of > RootsWeb's boxes, so the NT server's repeated crashes caused major > problems for us. > > It especially slowed mail deliveries from our list servers. > > To deal with this problem, the NT server has been "patched" to > reduce its vulnerability to attack and we have taken various other > technical measures to make us safer. > > Last night at 2am Sprintlink, with no warning to any of its > customers, attempted to upgrade the operating systems on its > backbone routers throughout the country. Things went badly south, > and the Net is still very much crippled right now. > > The Sprintlink disaster essentially disconnected pieces of RootsWeb > from The Net for several hours until we could adjust our routers to > work around the down pieces of Sprintlink's backbone. > > As the Sprintlink disaster rippled through The Net, it also took > down the routers at our feed from CRL. That happened while Karen > and I were away from our keyboards, and the CRL down wounded our > main list server. > > Some mail was lost, and we suspect some digests were damaged. We'll > be fixing things for a few days. ): > > Ultimately there is no way that an individual site can insulate > itself from a mess like last night, but we will be able to better > protect ourselves as RootsWeb grows and operates more T1 connections > to more Internet backbone carriers. > > Finally, this morning at 10am the textbase harddrive in the search > engine box glitched and wedged, killing that server. Karen and I > were working at that machine's console to revive it when the CRL > link went down, which was why we couldn't save the mail server. > > Disk problems like this should go away as we upgrade all our servers > to using redundant RAID-5 disk arrays, rather than depending on > single drives. > > *sigh* > > Thank goodness weeks like this don't happen too often. As noted > above, we'll be doing what we can to insulate ourselves from these > sorts of problems in the future. > > One other thought: Karen and Brian will be away from our consoles all > day tomorrow traveling on business that is critical to RootsWeb's > future. It worries us a lot to leave the servers without someone > physically at the consoles, but there will be some great sysadmins > monitoring the site remotely and we think the potential benefits of > this trip outweigh the risks of leaving the servers for a day. > > We apologize in advance if anything goes wrong, and we will be back > late tomorrow night in any case. Cheers, B. > > > -- > Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L > RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ > P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com >