Nobody Can Hear You
*sigh* Lockergnome's Web server was down all night. I just restarted it, although I wonder just how long I'll have to be chained to this machine. We tried mirroring images on another server, but if the HTML which calls those images isn't working, loading any kind of images won't work. I don't know. I almost think this could be a DoS or DDoS attack. But the weird thing is: e-mail, ftp, telnet, etc. work just fine. It's just our Web server that is getting clogged up. If we switched to a different http port, would that help isolate (and nullify) the DoS issue? This sucks.
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9 Comments
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 10:11am
Set up another server and load balance between them. That way if one goes down the other picks up the load.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 10:12am
Well, we did that for the images, but (that I know of) we can't do it easily with the HTML pages – which is our problem.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 10:37am
What if you set up a round robin dns? You would have lockergnome.com point to two (or more) ip addresses. Each time someone tries to go to there it would bounce you randomly to one of the ones specified in the DNS listing.
Name: yahoo.com
Addresses: 216.115.108.245, 216.115.108.243
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: lockergnome.com
Address: 216.246.17.205
If you have the content at both IP addresses (like yahoo does) then this should work.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 10:45am
fwiw, I am one of the many thrown into Comcast hell for the last week. For some reason I can not access the Lockergnome site or your web logs directly from Comcast. If I switch to a proxy server using something other than port 80 then I can retrieve your site.
I am reading reports that the Comcast problem may be due to routing. Web servers are seeing requests for the Comcast network, but the replies back from the web server to the clients on Comcast's network are not getting thru.
I have no idea if this is causing your problem, but I thought I would share the info.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 11:13am
Urgo has the right idea. As for switching to another HTTP port, as you probably know by now that according to IANA's list of ports there is only one HTTP port (port 80), though there are two HTTPS ports for some reason.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 11:40am
First off you should have a monitoring cronjob that checks the httpd processes every 5 or so minutes and fires off an email to the admins instead of sitting around and watching it. Also if there is a DoS attack or DDoS attack going on your logs should have at least some kind of trail you can follow. You can ban those IP's in the apache config. As for it crappin out on ya are there no logs to see what's happening? Is the site on *nix or Wintel? If it's *nix there is always some kind of clue as to why it's dying. FYI there are problems with the templates when u try and preview one of these posts.
Anonymous
January 5th, 2002
at 11:52am
Yeah, I'm waiting to hear back from my sysadmin about how to set up the cron job for it. As you can tell, I'm not as well versed in FreeBSD as, say… anything else. :)
Thanks for the note on the template error. I was tweaking them this morning and used the wrong variable(s). It should be fixed now.
Anonymous
January 6th, 2002
at 10:01am
Re: load-balancing, Chris, what I'm really talking about is having two servers set up behind a load-balancer, both running the same code. Highly-available web sites aren't difficult to set up but they can be expensive. If you're not having problems with a machine actually going belly-up, you can have all the HTML, CGI and so on residing on one machine with those file systems exported. The other machine then mounts and uses those share-points. The hostname/IP address that the outside world knows about is that of the load-balancer, not the machines themselves. The load balancer them dispatches the inbound request to whichever machine is least busy.
Make sense? Yeah, a cron job will do it but it's not fool-proof.
BTW, have you looked into why your apache is dying?
Anonymous
January 6th, 2002
at 10:18am
If only we had another server on hand. :)