[Nottingham] Weird Stuff

[Matthew Sackman]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 09:35:15PM +0100, Lee wrote:
> Caching server are bad, they break the end-to-end nature of the
> internet, if you want more users , add more bandwidth, easy. huh.
> transparent caches are evil, caches that users can 'decide' to use are
> good. incomming transparent caches are even worse, chained together
> caches your asking for trouble ;-). I've seen so many problems cause by
> caching proxies, I hate em......but if your tight, and want to save
> money/bandwidth...well it's the only way to fly.

That reminds me. In about the 3rd week of me working at Host Europe we
started getting all of these calls from people who were trying to get to
their own sites but were ending up at various porn sites. We couldn't
find anything wrong so started asking general questions.

Anyway, it turned out that they all were AOLusers, and the transparent
proxy had been hacked, intentionally generating a lot of traffic for
certain porn sites. We found it quite funny at the time...

Matthew

On a rather different note, those of you who remember my interest in
enbd will, I'm sure, be delighted to know that I've almost completed
work on network high availability of disk partitions achieved through
enbd + software RAID 1 + heartbeat. It has also lead me to discover how
stupidly designed and documented all the raidtools are, and bits of the
code are really really ugly, but this is generally to get round
raidtools issues.

The advantage of this is greater flexibility: for example, if you're
using cyrus as your corporate email server then there is no current way
of replication with cyrus (Cyrus-murder is an agregator, not
replicator). RAID 1 + enbd + heartbeat allows full replication and
redundancy. I also intend to use it on samba shares so that the contents
as a) always available and b) always current. Not sure how any locking
would work - doubt it would, but it's a start...

Of course I'll mention it when I'm happy it's all finished.

Matthew

-- 

Matthew Sackman
Nottingham
England

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