Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: carls on June 15, 2004, 09:21:16 PM
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(Edit: About the topic... I didn't know which forum to post this in so I felt I had to stress how this affects us Amiga owners, too :) oh and yes, I missspellet it... Akamai, akamai... :)
You might have noticed that big sites (and search engines) like Google, Yahoo, Altavista and even Microsoft has been down during parts of the day. The reason for this is that Akamai - who owns and operates a large number of DNS servers around the world - was down (probably due to a DDOS attack). Akamai claims that this is because of a large-scale attack on the Internet infrastructure (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/06/15/akamai/), which suggests that other big ISPs were affected too. However, no sites except the ones with their DNS records at Akamai seems to have been bothered by this.
So, why this post?
Well, today I learned a few things:
- Surfing without Google (or any other search engine) is almost impossible :-)
- Being a Windows/.NET-developer is nearly impossible with access to MSDN. Using Office help IS impossible because it's all online.
But most importantly: When big finances walk in and take over huge parts of the Internet infrastructure, the net automatically gets more vulnerable because there's a single point of failure.
Admittedly, the IP address for www.google.com still lead to web search heaven, but noone keeps stuff like that in mind. Internet is supposed to survive a nuclear attack and then it turns out it can't even survive a DDOS attack against a single company.
Fortunately, most of the companies have their own name servers, which were utilized shortly after the problem was discovered. But what if Akamai had a three-day TTL?
To me, this is the downside of the commrecialized net.
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- Being a Windows/.NET-developer is nearly impossible with access to MSDN. Using Office help IS impossible because it's all online.
Ah, if you were MorphOS developer you would not have such problems :lol:
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I prefer OS3.x :)
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Hasn't affected me or my ISP (yet)... Is this provider used more in Europe?
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MSN sites were down yesterday.. thats all I've noticed.
Mike.
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Akamai is used all over the world by a number of well-visited sites, but the problems are fixed now.
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What ISP's out source their DNS? If your ISP can't even take car of that small a detail, find someone new. Anyhoo, the only thing I ever heard of akamai being used for was serving up content like scifi.com's Seeing Ear Theater and whatnot. How does it affect me that google.com can't find IP addresses? All I need from them is the URL. DNS happens on my (ISP's) end.
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And to me the okay side of this is my father's rather small computer business with its own equipment that can handle this stuff should the major DNS servers go down for any really bad period of time...
DNS servers really aren't that difficult to operate, I'm shocked that ISPs don't ALL use their own DNS servers...
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Errr... Akamai DO user their own DNS servers :-)
The thing is that they've got DNS servers all over US, Europe and Asia and even if your own ISP provides their own DNS servers (most of them do) there's not much you can do when all of Google's records are on Akamais servers.
When you type "www.google.com" in your browser, it goes like this (oversimplified): Your browser -> .com root server (finds google.com's DNS at Akamai) -> Akamai (looks up the correct IP) -> back to your computer.
But if Akamai is down, well, there's not much you can do about it.
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I havent seen it here yet, but its got into the servers at work and they had to rebuild them to get them online again. Sad world we are in today....
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@Acill
Akamai is not a virus, it's a company.
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- Surfing without Google (or any other search engine) is almost impossible
Since you're swedish you could use www.google.se instead if this happens again. That doesn't use akamai since it's in the .se domain, or does it?
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@Casper
Nope, google.se uses Akamai, too.
dig says:
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.se. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.se. 976 IN CNAME www.google.akadns.net.
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Yea,
Akamai seems to have discovered (and blocked) that the source was came from a `bot-net` of zombie PC`s...
This attack was an unusual case as DOS were very coordinated and precisely targeted,
Seems like a good case to release the XP SP2 upgrade to all Windoze users (er, pirates), as this would help everyone...