SDF Punted, Due to DDOS 143
bullshizzle writes "The longest running Public Access UNIX System (SDF, running BSD) est. 1989 had their services terminated abruptly by NWLink because of a DDoS attack. Termination was carried out immediately without prior notification, which violates their contract (page1, page2). Complaints can be filed to the Washington State Attorney General's Office by filling out this simple form conveniently located online. You can follow the story at lonestar.org." While still bad, I've been corrected - SDF was *not* the longest running public access Unix - ArborNet (Located right here in my town) has been around for at least a number more years.
Their forum (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't understand this. (Score:3, Informative)
(uugh, IHBT)
Re:public access (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. I joined up when i heard about it in 99 and really cut my teeth on UNIX there, in spite of having been exposed to UNIX at least a year earlier. What makes SDF so great is that there is a real community of users who have their own chat app, their own "message board" app, all inside the shell. It reminded me of the community on the BBSes of old. Stephen (the sysadmin) regularly participates in user discussions and the opinions of the users help shape the direction of the system. In just the past few years i've seen it grow from a single system running Linux/i386 to seven or eight networked NetBSD/Alpha boxes with a user-built MUD, virtual hosting, special IRC bot accounts, all kinds of things. People who have been there since 1989 have seen it grow from SysV UNIX to 386BSD to Linux, on a dozen architectures.
This is nightmare for some of us regular users. I log on every day and rely on it for all my email, for my web page, for ICQ, for hundreds of personal files... SDF is my all-purpose scratchpad, and my $HOME contains so many little text files and projects i've worked on in the past four years. Some of the users have paid-for virtual host accounts and run business websites hosted on SDF. All these people are losing their business, their sites are inaccessible... It's a sad, sad day. I only recall one time in the past four years SDF has been down for longer than a few hours, and i believe that was due to a DDoS attack while they were located in Texas, and just before they moved from Linux to NetBSD.
*sigh* Some people just don't get it :-(
alison at sdf.lonestar.org
Trying to link the WA consumer complaint form (Score:3, Informative)
Not Found
The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it. Please inform the site administrator of the referring page.
Re:Trying to link the WA consumer complaint form (Score:3, Informative)
NWLink (Score:3, Informative)
I left NWLink [nwlink.com] DSL a couple of weeks ago over their mediocre uptime and high costs, especially bandwidth costs. They were down quite a few hours per month lately (that I noticed) and their tech support was not so good. They seemed to have a lot of router configuration problems: there were frequent router loops. This may have been partly due to their prime (only?) feed to most of the world being alter.net [alter.net], which at least in this neck of the woods is quite slow and tangled. NWlink claimed at one point that they were just finishing up some big network reconfiguration, and things should get better: when things didn't seem to, that was the end for me. I should have waited to switch: it would be nice to dump them now in protest over their DDOSing of SDF :-).
I chose NWLink several years ago because at the time their prices were good, and my previous provider, NW Nexus [nwnexus.com], had been bought out twice and become expensive and quite unreliable in the process. Now I'm with DSL Only [dsl-only.net], and so far they seem great. ISP service is $18/month for 640/256 DSL, with no bandwidth charges, no restrictions on use, a static IP, and two mailboxes. It's been reliable so far, and they are direct to a local exchange that in turn is direct to my work and to Internet2, so ping times and bandwidth are excellent.
It would be nice to be done with ISP switches forever: maybe this is it. The other good news is that this was the easiest ISP switch so far: Qwest seems to have it figured out now, and it was completely routine.
FYI. As always, YMMV.
Re:Easy to get rid of a company you don't like (Score:3, Informative)
NWLink (aka Pacifier aka Europa) has tens of thousands of customers here in the Northwest, including me, and the DoS effectively shut down their entire customer base -- 3 times over the past 3 weeks.
Either they were going to get complaints from one customer, lonestar.org, or they were going to get complaints from thousands of other customers (many of whom they had to pay monetary damages to make up for the loss of service). I can put up with my Internet access being cut off once, twice, but the 3rd time it happens I'm going to seriously consider switching providers. NWLink did what they had to do to save most of their customer base.
Re:Sorry Won't Fly. (Score:5, Informative)
Posted to SDF message board by the owner of NWLink:
Re:M-Net? (Score:2, Informative)
Both systems are still active, still public-access, and still run Unix -- so whichever one is oldest, it isn't SDF.
Complaint form link (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This kind of crap will continue (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a few links to the next level of annoyances:
Re:You're missing the point (Score:4, Informative)