OpenBSD Journal

Memoirs of a Network Disaster

Contributed by jason on from the not-your-openbsd-story dept.

Michael W. Lucas posted a new blog entry about one of his own harrowing experiences years ago. Helpless vendors and inadequate commercial software forced his company to turn to OpenBSD and PF for a solution to their bandwidth problem.

One Monday morning, a customer that had expected to use very little bandwidth found that they had sufficient requests to devour twice the bandwidth we had for the entire datacenter. This affected every customer. If your $9.95/month web page is slow you have little to complain about, but if your multiple-thousands-of-dollars-a-month Web application is slow you pick up the phone and scream until the problem stops...

Does Puffy arrive in time to save the day? Read Michael's story to find out!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Dave Steinberg (redterror) dave@redterror.net on http://www.geekisp.com/

    Oh the irony, his site is down.

    Comments
    1. By jason (jason) on http://undeadly.org/

      Yes, it was deliciously ironic. Site appears to be back up now. :)

      Comments
      1. By Michael W Lucas (agshekeloh) on http://www.michaelwlucas.com

        Yeah, yeah, very funny guys. :-)

        One post on undeadly gives me more traffic in an hour than the rest of this month combined. I think I'm now configured to handle the rampaging undeadly hordes, and have what I need to file a bug report.

        Comments
        1. By jason (jason) on http://www.dixongroup.net/

          On the one hand I'm sorry that it caused you headaches. On the other hand, I'm thrilled that Undeadly is busy enough to cause such an effect. :)

          Comments
          1. By Michael W Lucas (agshekeloh) on http://www.michaelwlucas.com

            > On the one hand I'm sorry that it caused you headaches. On the other hand, I'm thrilled that Undeadly is busy enough to cause such an effect. :)

            No worries, really.

            It's my personal server. Other than link spammers and RSS readers, I get 40-50 hits a day, average. The hardware is five years old, 256MB RAM. If my blog gets too popular, I'll buy more hardware.

            Oh, and my kernel is cleverly tweaked (cough) to maximize its memory. And running -current. Which I screw with. Arbitrarily and ignorantly. In other words, I walk around with the gun pointed at my foot and my finger on the trigger. I can't really whinge if someone bumps my elbow and my foot suddenly hurts...

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Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]