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I've done some googling before asking here: Can anybody explain why Linode is so often targeted like this? We moved Cronitor off Linode in spring 2015. During t

I've done some googling before asking here: Can anybody explain why Linode is so often targeted like this? We moved Cronitor off Linode in spring 2015. During the christmas holiday when they suffered a 2 week DDOS I thought of the family time I'd be missing that year as we did a crash migration to AWS had we not migrated when we did. I have to imagine this has been horrible for their business. I would use Linode if I needed to lease computational power, because it is still a great value vs AWS, but I could not run a high availability service there. It would feel like professional malpractice at this point.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nxzero 10y ago
Ask HN: Who is behind the Linode DDOS attacks? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797795
- ryanlol 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797827 Found the culprit.
mappu 10y ago
We stuck with Linode after that, but the important parts now failover to Vultr.
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  How did you set it up to failover? Our MySQL database is very large, and I'm not sure of the best way to ensure it is up to date on another host.
  - anthony_franco 10y ago
    For our setup we just have master-master replication across two different hosting providers.
    - leesalminen 10y ago
      I've been wondering about this lately. Is it really feasible for a small (one man?) team to keep master-master MySQL replication over WAN running smoothly?
      - donut2d 10y ago
        I'm a one man operation keeping a master-slave setup with a manual failover and it's been pretty smooth sailing once I got it setup. Don't know how much more complex master-master would be.
        viraptor 10y ago
        It's pretty much the same. You almost never want writes on both sides (now in a failover plan anyway), so as long as you have a switch for which side receives the writes, it's simple.
        monkeywork 10y ago
        Site A, insure any writes use odd numbers in unique field. Site B, insure any writes use even numbers for unique field. This avoids conflict.
        echelon 10y ago
        Or allow writes in both datacenters with randomized tokens as keys. If you need datacenter-affinity for certain events, use one of the token bytes to encode the author datacenter. Updates that don't have to land in order can be written in an eventually consistent manner. Write a feed of changes in each datacenter and have the peers consume this update feed. Viola, partition-tolerant master-master with failover.
- noir-york 10y ago
  We stuck with Linode after last Christmas too, but this new attack looks like the final straw. How have you found Vultr?
  - mappu 10y ago
    All's well so far! Happy to recommend them. They seem to be the next biggest name in VPSes after Linode and DigitalOcean, with broadly similar price and quality.
    - noir-york 10y ago
      Thanks! Will give them a shot
  - secure 10y ago
    My VM on vultr has better performance than the comparable DigitalOcean one. Uptime is okay as well, haven’t had any trouble so far.
  - theyak 10y ago
    We've moved off vultr. Too many network down times for no known reason and hard reboots on our servers causing loss of data. A friend has had similar experiences. Their support was also poor.
funkyy 10y ago
I am also surprised as this is not the first time I am reading about it on HN. Linode seems to be highly vulnerable to certain attacks as we could see in the past. I hope they will fix it and provide a permanent solution as I was hoping to use them as a part of my network, but I see more and more signals they can't handle serious traffic. Hopefully, they will redesign their infrastructure to handle it. I am with all of you guys that are affected by this. I am looking forward to them to resolving this soon.
- morecoffee 10y ago
  Isn't the problem money? They could certainly fix it but would have to raise the prices on each VPS?
  - reefoctopus 10y ago
    I'd be ok with paying twice what I'm currently paying if they could solve this problem. We're with Linode because it would cost us about 10x as much to run on AWS, and we can't justify that.
    - hakanensari 10y ago
      They're price-matching DigitalOcean, so raising prices is probably out of the question.
      - ksec 10y ago
        Linode is now half the price of DO per RAM
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Disclaimer: Linode employee, not in networking My understanding is that Atlanta in particular has some poor upstreams and is making our job pretty difficult there. Notice that it's almost always Atlanta that's getting hit. I would suggest just using other datacenters or making sure your high availability model includes several DCs (which I would suggest at any hosting provider, really).
busterarm 10y ago
We were sort of in the same boat as you last year. We were already prepping our failover and it was about 95% ready to go when the DDOS started on our Christmas break (and our senior guy who did all of our deploys was out of communication). December 23rd was a difficult 10 hour, remote day but we got things finished up and could relax afterwards.
spydum 10y ago
As others have said, maybe it's to affect a customer. However, hosting industry had a lot of roots in the adult content industry, and those guys didn't have many ethical guidelines. It was not uncommon for hosting companies to DDoS each other to drive a competitor out of business. Not saying that is the case here, but perhaps?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nxzero 10y ago

Ask HN: Who is behind the Linode DDOS attacks? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797795

ryanlol 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797827 Found the culprit.

mappu 10y ago

We stuck with Linode after that, but the important parts now failover to Vultr.

reefoctopus 10y ago
How did you set it up to failover? Our MySQL database is very large, and I'm not sure of the best way to ensure it is up to date on another host.
- anthony_franco 10y ago
  For our setup we just have master-master replication across two different hosting providers.
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    I've been wondering about this lately. Is it really feasible for a small (one man?) team to keep master-master MySQL replication over WAN running smoothly?
    - donut2d 10y ago
      I'm a one man operation keeping a master-slave setup with a manual failover and it's been pretty smooth sailing once I got it setup. Don't know how much more complex master-master would be.
      - viraptor 10y ago
        It's pretty much the same. You almost never want writes on both sides (now in a failover plan anyway), so as long as you have a switch for which side receives the writes, it's simple.
        monkeywork 10y ago
        Site A, insure any writes use odd numbers in unique field. Site B, insure any writes use even numbers for unique field. This avoids conflict.
        echelon 10y ago
        Or allow writes in both datacenters with randomized tokens as keys. If you need datacenter-affinity for certain events, use one of the token bytes to encode the author datacenter. Updates that don't have to land in order can be written in an eventually consistent manner. Write a feed of changes in each datacenter and have the peers consume this update feed. Viola, partition-tolerant master-master with failover.
noir-york 10y ago
We stuck with Linode after last Christmas too, but this new attack looks like the final straw. How have you found Vultr?
- mappu 10y ago
  All's well so far! Happy to recommend them. They seem to be the next biggest name in VPSes after Linode and DigitalOcean, with broadly similar price and quality.
  - noir-york 10y ago
    Thanks! Will give them a shot
- secure 10y ago
  My VM on vultr has better performance than the comparable DigitalOcean one. Uptime is okay as well, haven’t had any trouble so far.
- theyak 10y ago
  We've moved off vultr. Too many network down times for no known reason and hard reboots on our servers causing loss of data. A friend has had similar experiences. Their support was also poor.

funkyy 10y ago

I am also surprised as this is not the first time I am reading about it on HN. Linode seems to be highly vulnerable to certain attacks as we could see in the past. I hope they will fix it and provide a permanent solution as I was hoping to use them as a part of my network, but I see more and more signals they can't handle serious traffic. Hopefully, they will redesign their infrastructure to handle it. I am with all of you guys that are affected by this. I am looking forward to them to resolving this soon.

morecoffee 10y ago
Isn't the problem money? They could certainly fix it but would have to raise the prices on each VPS?
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  I'd be ok with paying twice what I'm currently paying if they could solve this problem. We're with Linode because it would cost us about 10x as much to run on AWS, and we can't justify that.
  - hakanensari 10y ago
    They're price-matching DigitalOcean, so raising prices is probably out of the question.
    - ksec 10y ago
      Linode is now half the price of DO per RAM
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
Disclaimer: Linode employee, not in networking My understanding is that Atlanta in particular has some poor upstreams and is making our job pretty difficult there. Notice that it's almost always Atlanta that's getting hit. I would suggest just using other datacenters or making sure your high availability model includes several DCs (which I would suggest at any hosting provider, really).

busterarm 10y ago

We were sort of in the same boat as you last year. We were already prepping our failover and it was about 95% ready to go when the DDOS started on our Christmas break (and our senior guy who did all of our deploys was out of communication). December 23rd was a difficult 10 hour, remote day but we got things finished up and could relax afterwards.

spydum 10y ago

As others have said, maybe it's to affect a customer. However, hosting industry had a lot of roots in the adult content industry, and those guys didn't have many ethical guidelines. It was not uncommon for hosting companies to DDoS each other to drive a competitor out of business. Not saying that is the case here, but perhaps?