> One of more effective strategies was to field a "black hole" server, basically it was an http server that answered like you had gotten hold of it but then it

> One of more effective strategies was to field a "black hole" server, basically it was an http server that answered like you had gotten hold of it but then it never sent any data. With some simple kernel mods these TCP connections were silently removed on our end so they took no resources and the client would wait basically forever. We ack'd all keep alive packets with "Yup, we're here." so they just kept waiting and waiting. Mailinator would do a similar thing with their custom email server hardware. Since they didn't really use sockets in the traditional sense, they were happy to give slooow replies and never disconnect "bad" connections.