Hi, I'm Iljitsch van Beijnum. This page has all posts about all subjects.
This is a post I wrote for O'Reilly back in January 2003 when the SQL Slammer worm hit. It seems it's gone from their site now, so I'm putting it here, including the comments.
Permalink - posted 2003-01-28
Image link - posted 2002-11-15 in
I'm a bit behind on the news. The most important IDR news is that of the DoS-attacks on the root nameservers on October 21st. (There will be more on this in the tech list news soon.) By some strange coincedence, I had just put a page outlining anti-denial-of-service measures up on this site. I've been working on this since before the summer, but I hadn't yet really published the story on this site since I was considering publishing it somewhere else and I have been unable to test how good it works.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-31
On October 4th, Worldcom/UUNET had a major outage. Worldcom attributes the problems to "a route table issue". It is still unclear what happened, but the rumors indicate a problem similar to the one that AT&T experienced in August: something went wrong while managing the routers, but this time it wasn't a configuration problem, but the problems started after loading a different Cisco IOS image in a large number of routers.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-30
netVmg, a company selling products that optimize traffic flow for organizations with more than one connection to the net, didn't waste any time and announced a "webinar" on October 9th, promising to tell what happened and how to prevent it. I think they mean that if you use their products, your traffic is automatically rerouted around any black holes or congestion in ISP networks. Another company selling similar products, Route Science, had a spokesperson explain that BGP is pretty much brain dead in an Americas Network article.
What those companies conveniently fail to mention is that what their (expensive) products do automatically, can also be done by hand on any BGP router. But I guess as long as they keep the mis-information to a minimum and they don't inject instability into the global routing table by trying to micro-manage inbound traffic flows, their products are harmless and serve a need.
Check out netVmg's newsletter called The Best Path for not-too-technical discussions about the benefits of multihoming with the marketese limited to reasonable levels.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-29