The Wiki is temporarily down due to DDoS.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 1:07 am

End of transmission.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 2:55 am

Any idea about the motive, if there is one?

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 3:23 am

It was against the host as a whole, not us. It's back up, by the way.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 4:18 am

Kewlio. So, for the Luddites, what's a DDoS?

ubernoob · Post by **ubernoob** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 4:22 am

Doom wrote:Kewlio. So, for the Luddites, what's a DDoS?

Distributed Denial of Service attack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS#Distributed_attack

For Valor · Post by **For Valor** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 5:45 am

the host as a whole?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 9:50 am

It's the simplest way to (temporarily) take down a site you don't like, as long as your own manpower/combined bandwidth power is bigger than their server capacity. Everyone constantly pings the server or just "tries to access stuff" so as to basically block the Internet tubes/eat all the bandwidth and the site goes down for a while.

Never seen it last that long. But it tends to happen to 4chan on a yearly basis. I'd say "And nothing of value was lost", except when that happens they go to other places, kind of like when Estate Agents lose their jobs in property slumps: sounds good to start with, but then everyone else has to deal with them.

I believe "some kids in Russia who are not at all affiliated with PM Putin" did it to the official Georgian website, once. Anonymous also did it to the Australian website (in retaliation to Stephen Conroy's "Block the Internet, PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" idea. "You say there should be no dicks on the Internet? We'll start with you, Steve"), Scientology...

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 9:40 pm

It gets done every so often, sometimes by one dude and millions of other people's computers. It also gets done by accident all the time when sites experience a spike in publicity or someone with online activation fucks up their math on release day.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sat Dec 04, 2010 12:29 am

Cats in the tubes, etc.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Sat Dec 04, 2010 2:08 am

To clarify on how a DDoS works, for this one they didn't overcome the host's bandwidth (which is far more than what was given). The problem ends up being that the servers can't actually handle that level of requests, and just freeze up. There are also a _ton_ of computers involved, and a _ton_ of traffic, so the idea of "filter out all the bad computers" doesn't quite work -- how do you filter 2 gbit/sec of traffic in realtime? (The answer is you don't, not without specialized hardware, so as a result the site goes down while said hardware gets appropriated and moved from wherever it's already sitting in the data center.)

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Dec 04, 2010 6:12 am

Who would DDoS the wiki though?

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Sat Dec 04, 2010 6:28 am

They didn't specifically attack the wiki. They attacked another site that is hosted on the same computers as the wiki, forcing the wiki offline as a side effect.

Was the attack a naive botnet flood, or were they doing anything clever (slowloris, smurf/fraggle, etc)?

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:24 am

name_here wrote:It gets done every so often, sometimes by one dude and millions of other people's computers. It also gets done by accident all the time when sites experience a spike in publicity or someone with online activation fucks up their math on release day.

Actually its constant, something is always being DDoSed. You can ransom people's websites if you don't mind being a criminal.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed Dec 15, 2010 9:42 pm

Jesus Christ, here we go again (got a text message from a user this time, and yet nothing from Onenode).

The thing that really bothers me is that they don't reimburse downtime due to DDoS. Well, I think the proper response to that is not paying them money to host my website anymore.

edit: My anger at Onenode was a bit misplaced, seems the entire datacenter is down. Again.