Blanked out

According to Dean Esmay, who knows about this sort of thing, UUnet had some major problems last night, which might have been the result of a Denial of Service attack. As a result, Net traffic was snarled, and some data packets never went anywhere at all. Indeed, there was about a 30-percent reduction in overnight traffic at this site.

Tonight, however, there will be a 100-percent reduction at this site: my little row of the server farm is being physically relocated, as in "Okay, load that box on the truck, Jim," some time around midnight CDT. How long this will take, I don't know; I expect to be up and running Sunday morning without incident.

(Update, 6:30 pm: Apparently it was a DoS, but not aimed at UUnet; it was an exploit of an existing security hole in Microsoft servers that not everyone chose to fix when the patch was issued. And this explains why I was still getting traffic: this site runs on a Linux box.)

Posted at 10:24 AM to Blogorrhea