Man, this is like pulling teath tonight! The FF is one of the fastest things I use on the web but tonight it's running 2 to as long as 5 minuts to open a page that last week took the blink of an eye. :P Did the pipe freeze up someplace in Canada? :-/ Hay Paul, you standing in the hose? ???
Andy
Here is a time when "Information Highway" can make a little sense.
As far as I know the Forestry Forum server was running normal last night. For me. Somebody standing on the hose could make sense. EVERYONE of us gets to the forum through a different set of phone companies, switches, routers, etc. to finally end up at the forestry forum website. Your paticular route at any given time could have a "road block" or a "detour" or a "traffic slowdown" due to any number of things.
Everyone experienced a slowdown earlier in the week when the dallas based network was under the denial of service attack from hackers. They were flooding the network with more data then it could handle causing your data request to get lost. Basically when you go to a webpage thats what you are doing is starting a data transfer.
Here is something that is sort of fun to mess with and it will give you an idea how you are traveling to the forum. Most of you should have this on your computers.
Go to Start, then programs, then if you have it, MS-DOS Prompt and open it.
When you open it you should see c:\WINDOWS> and a blinking curser point.
type in exactly this including the space: tracert forestryforum.com
then hit enter on your keyboard.
I am breaking one of my big rules here for this example. The picture size is way wide but I want you to see what my trace route returned.
(https://forestryforum.com/images/YaBBImages/userpics/dos.gif)
In line 3 we can see that I am on the Charter Michigan system going in to bay city.
On line 4 I have entered Chigaco and on to the sprint phone systems after a couple hops on thier system we enter the quest phone service in chicago on line 7.
On line 9 we get to Kansas City Mo still on quest, then on to Dallas on line 11
on hop 14 we finally end up on the network that we are looking for. I can tell that by the propagation.net.
on line 16 we have traveled to our final destination of the Forestry Forum.
Your route will be totally different. When I had to phone dial ups here. I could dial in on one and my trace rt would go through san fransisco I could hang up and dial in on the other ISP and be routed through New jersey.
If you see an * and a timed out before you get th the forum, likely that is where the slow down is occuring. If you get a series of *'s once you pass anything that says propagation.net in it, the fault is either at the network or maybe our server.
To tell if its our network try to got to cihost.com if that website fails to load fast it is a network problen and not my server.
All this is probably way more then anybody wanted to hear. You should have to take a real road trip with me in the car someday. :D
Well thats more than I was looking for BUT I always like to know what makes things work.
So you get an A+ in my book!!! :P
THANKS :)
Andy
And it's running just fine now so Paul must have got off the hose. :D :D
Actually, a worm infecting Microsoft IIS based web servers caused world-wide traffic problems throughout the Internet last night.
Many sites were forced to shut down and regroup. I checked sprintpcs at noon today and they were out of commission, but are back on line tonight. It may continue sporadically for several days.
-Doug
Systems Affected:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 pre SP3
Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE) 2000
Description:
Late Friday, January 24, 2003 we became aware of a new SQL worm spreading quickly across various networks around the world.
The worm is spreading using a buffer overflow to exploit a flaw in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The SQL 2000 server flaw was discovered in July, 2002 by Next Generation Security Software Ltd. The buffer overflow exists because of the way SQL improperly handles data sent to its Microsoft SQL Monitor port. Attackers leveraging this vulnerability will be executing their code as SYSTEM, since Microsoft SQL Server 2000 runs with SYSTEM privileges.
The worm works by generating pseudo-random IP addresses to try to infect with its payload. The worm payload does not contain any additional malicious content (in the form of backdoors etc.); however, because of the nature of the worm and the speed at which it attempts to re-infect systems, it can potentially create a denial-of-service attack against infected networks.
http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Flash/AL20030125.html
The patch for this has been out for a long time. Microsoft sent it out in late July if I remember right. We use Windows 2000 server and have not had any problems with our servers 'yet', we see that particular attack in our server logs at least once a day.
According to what I heard on NPR, last night, there are over 22,000 servers that didn't bother to update with the fix. These are the ones that are dumping massive quantities of data onto the network, causing problems for everyone.
This is just another "growing pain" that the Internet is experiencing. It points up the fact that people have a responsibility that goes beyond protecting their own interests. I guess we'll have to have Server Cops, next. :-/
There were a couple of nights that I couldn't get on the forum,or any other sight for that matter.
Andy,I thought it was something to do with you and your Instant message box,so I kept quiet,didn't want to make trouble for you. :P
Thanks Paul. Glad your looking out for me. ::)
;D
Well Andy,if you shut down the internet,the Feds would normally send you to Alaska.If you are already there,I'm afraid the next stop is Austrailia.
We don't want that now do we? Who will watch my back?