6 ms·
A down detector for down detector's down detector
- SeanAnderson 11mo agoI'm not affiliated with this genius. I was just snooping around the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012), took a chance at modifying the site's URL, and found myself pleasantly surprised.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- rocauc 11mo agoyes, downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector is available.
- AceJohnny2 11mo agoi've reached semantic satiation
- thenthenthen 11mo agoTime for updetector.com! (On the plus side, this could detect if itself was up!)
- sixtyj 11mo agoIs there a length limit for domain names? :)
- Cthulhu_ 11mo agoYes, according to RFC 1035 section 2.3.4 [0], it's 255 octets. Long answer written by a human: https://superuser.com/a/1843870 https://superuser.com/a/1843870 [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035#section-2.3.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035#section-2.3.4
- danirod 11mo agoWell, that was fast. https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....
- daanavitch 11mo agoUnfortunately this website relies on Tailwind's CDN for styling, which in turn is deployed on Vercel, which in turn is mostly hosted on AWS.
- rectang 11mo agoThe bottom turtle should be a raspberry pi in somebody’s closet. No dependencies.
- FeepingCreature 11mo agoBad news about ISPs... Really you want a RPi on solar power, attached to a longwave transmitter, and with direct peering agreements with all dominant global providers. Most well-connected rpi in existence.
- NitpickLawyer 11mo agoAdd that moon-bouncing thing that got popular last week. For redundancy.
- 5d41402abc4b 11mo agoThe page is 320KB in size. They could have made it a static page with some simple HTML, the whole thing would have been under 10KB and would not have needed a CDN.
- rectang 11mo agoSeems like this madness is only going to end when we hit the 63-character limit for domain name labels.
- keepamovin 11mo agoJust thinking about it, wouldn't a distributed P2P "mesh" be a better fit for reliability probing? We could share results, see where it was inaccessible from. It's kind of an oxymoron to have a centralized down detector lol
- Cthulhu_ 11mo agoSure, a p2p network of people doing distributed pings on a wide range of services sounds like a good idea. Of course, you'd need people willing to run it. A small incentive might be needed... or just a default of "if you want to use this software, you agree to also have your client ping other websites to check if they're up from your location". But it's not a new idea apparently, a quick search led to https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lv9flt/built_a_free_distributed_uptime_monitoring_tool/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lv9flt/built_a... / https://synthmon.io/home https://synthmon.io/home,
- 4ggr0 11mo agoHow To Build a Botnet 101
- imiric 11mo agoOr—hear me out—we actually build services that leverage the native distributed infrastructure of the internet, so that we don't need down detectors. What a concept.
- eisbaw 11mo ago100% agree. But with most used services being pushed by coorps, it will remain centralized until the "distributed mesh" becomes at least as good/robust.
- keepamovin 11mo agoI think this is so important and in fact with services now becoming utilities for daily life and the national/global economy, it's something that people like DARPA could get behind. We understand why a big peering corp's incentives might not align with true distributed (and hence how they may lobby for the crippling of certain useful p2p APIs from being widely 'distributed'), but it's something we should really push for and technically just do. And we'd probably find many allies doing it in the continuity of system and reliability space.
- sam-cop-vimes 11mo agoI'm almost wishing for the next major outage just so I can see this working :-)
- theturtlemoves 11mo agoDown detectors all the way down
- lnyan 11mo agoCan it detect when it itself is down
- elashri 11mo agoNo, you will need another layer of down detector.
- paul_sutyrin 11mo agoThat'll be HN indeed.
- My_Name 11mo agoWho watches the watchmen indeed
- spirographer 11mo agoIt would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.
- rozenmd 11mo agoAnd a page monitoring this one: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=o398tWuqadY9XvgOYxt9W&url=https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=o398t... This one looks like it's behind a CDN, at least
- fedeb95 11mo agowho detects the down detectors's down detector's downs?
- kitd 11mo agoI'm really hoping downdetector.com
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ndr42 11mo agoThe title reminds me of the 5th installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: "Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite." The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.
- standarditem 11mo agoIt's down detectors all the way down
- tfiskgul 11mo agohttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/661/mostly-harmless-by-douglas-adams/9780739332146/excerpt https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/661/mostly-harmless-...
- anonymousiam 11mo agoIt reminds me of the Get Smart episode "Ironhand" (1969), where the top secret plans for the AAAMM (Anti-anti-anti-missile missile) are stolen. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0587527 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0587527 (Mel Brooks & Buck Henry)
- 0x006A 11mo agoits down detectors all the way down
- jb1991 11mo agoHm, looks like this site is down.
- raverbashing 11mo agoThe ultimate down detector should have a fixed IP address as well, in the case of other stuff failing as well
- reddalo 11mo agoYes, the ultimate down detector should be hosted on a static IP, without need to pass through DNS.
- imoverclocked 11mo agoI think we need to make a highly-available downdetector from a collection of SBCs hosted around the world. Each node gets its configuration via git-pull which is self-hosted/republished. Simplest DNS configuration possible: each node has a unique $n.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com while they also happily host a common hostname with simple dns round robin entries for it.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com. The common page attempts to load a check resource (perhaps just a tiny css output?) from all of the $n.i.u.c nodes which just changes a div from gray to green/red. It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests. With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s
- huhtenberg 11mo agoClearly, the proper solution is to have a p2p mesh of down detectors. As per usual, all new is something old, well-forgotten.
- indigo945 11mo agoInterestingly enough, the architecture of "a p2p mesh of down detectors" converges with the architecture of "not using a down detector".
- globalnode 11mo agofyi theres also a 4x https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.... didnt check past that
- FabCH 11mo agoSeems to be down...
- mrbluecoat 11mo agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012
- precommunicator 11mo agoNo, it's just one layer deeper.
- cadamsdotcom 11mo agoQuick! Time to register downforeveryone-orjustdowndetector.com :D
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- victor22 11mo agoIt's not checking for South America, they need to deploy more capital
- Ayc0 11mo agoIn a similar fashion, Datadog just released: https://updog.ai https://updog.ai
- halgir 11mo agoWhat's Updog?
- lippihom 11mo agoRelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists (editing discussion is amusing).
- nightfeather 11mo agoNow let's make it into the Downdetector's site list and complete the loop!
- faidit 11mo agoUNLIMITED POWER!
- throwpoaster 11mo agoThis is down.
- semiquaver 11mo agoIt’s down for me.
- SeanAnderson 11mo agoI pinged DownDetector's support team to let them know about all this and they helpfully pointed me to https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)
- az09mugen 11mo agoHope it isn't powered by cloudflare, lol.