Thursday, May 04, 2006
And of course, it was related to spam
OK, so why is any of this information—about a company completely unrelated to Six Apart—important background? Because according to a post on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, at some point yesterday the people at Blue Security decided that the best way to deal with the attack was to point the hostname www.bluesecurity.com to their TypePad-hosted weblog, bluesecurity.blogs.com.
Via shadesong, The dishonor of Blue Security
Changing DNS records to fend off a DDoS attack is certainly a novel approach to the problem. And from reading up on Blue Security, their spam fighting approach seemed to have pissed off the major spammers enough to launch a DDoS against them.
But I suspect this has much larger implications than just if Blue Security was right in what they did or not—it gives more fuel to the AT&Ts and Comcasts that want to carve up the Internet into fiefdoms of classed services, for our protection of course.
The little conspriacy theorist inside me wonders if the likes of AT&T and Comcast aren't indirectly funding spamming companies in the hope of pushing people over the edge into accepting a more tiered service plan for our protections, of course.
Less bogarts this time
The T-1 card for XXXXXXXX came in today, and around 5:30 I showed up at the office to install it. And of course F, who I informed earlier in the day I was coming over, had neglected to inform anyone until after I showed up.
It was rather amusing actually. I was in the server room with C when F called C to say I was coming over. C said okay, then hung up. C then told me to install the card, which requires turning off the router (most Cisco routers have hot-swappable parts—not this particular model though). Less than a minute F calls C saying the network was down. C then said yes, might it have something to do with Sean, who already showed up, installing the T-1?
Okay, perhaps you had to be there.
But it was amusing to see just how addicted to the Internet everyone at XXXXXXXX is.
Anyway, I came prepared with the configuration printed out in case the interfaces were renumbered (they were) and with the special console cable (which I did use to configure the T-1 card). The T-1 circuit however, failed to come up, and remained down even after poking at it from The Office (I could still get to XXXXXXXX's router from the DSL connection). In the end, I had to call in a trouble ticket with The Monopolistic Phone Company.
Later in the evening I got a call back from The Monopolistic Phone Company—their stuff is perfect, it must be something from the T-1 jack onwards at the XXXXXXXX side. Cable, misconfigured T-1 card, not their bailiwick.
Sigh.
