Before I delve into the meat of this post, Internet access is critical to what we (UNIXy) do. We are a fully managed server and cluster provider. The quality of service we offer is critical to our success. So it’s only natural we concert a continuous effort to improve the service on all fronts. Being fully staffed and accessible to our clients 24/7 is imperative. We must be available within short notice (e.g. < 10 minutes) at all times around the clock.

So Internet at 10000 feet means we don’t have to deal with temporary staffing shortages due to unplanned trips. But most importantly it means service quality remains consistent. Internet at 10k is even more important as we expand to different parts of the country and Europe. But in such a rough, high altitude environment there are so many things that can go wrong with the Wifi service. And it has. Southwest Airlines’ Wifi service is too unreliable to consider.

I’ll ask the pilot to reboot the system to see if it helps

On the other hand, Virgin America’s Wifi system powered by Gogo  LLC is very reliable. So this is the airline we’ve been booking with lately. While domestic flights have us covered, transatlantic connectivity has yet to materialize. 30000 feet is the new frontier. I’m confident that some day we’ll be back here reporting about how good it is to support our clients at 30k feet.

Cheers

Don’t pass on the opportunity to get awarded two owned licenses ($278 value) and a feature on our blog! Submit your artwork for either the cPanel Varnish Plugin or the DirectAdmin Varnish Plugin to isaig@unixy.net.

I am proud to pre-announce our strategic expansion of Web hosting operations in Europe and in North Africa. Taking on this initiative is consistent with our vision to become a world-wide player in the managed server arena. More information will become available soon.

Varnish, the state-of-the-art HTTP accelerator, v3.0 (up from v2.1.x) is scheduled to be released in a few hours. The folks at Varnish Cache have worked tirelessly to get the 3.0 release out of the door. Congratulations on work well done!

Here are some of the major changes and additions:

Plugin Support – VMOD

VMOD is to Varnish as loadable module is to a kernel.  The new Varnish provides a programmable interface that enables expanding the VCL (Varnish Configuration Language). This VMOD feature includes relatively advanced concepts like functions, pointers, and data types. I think this is the most complex piece to go in v3.0.

Streaming Support

This is a long awaited feature. Up until today, Varnish broke HTTP streaming slowing down adoption of the software in the multimedia space and content delivery. This feature makes it possible to accelerate HTTP streaming. Streaming is controlled via the boolean beresp.do_stream.

Compression and Decompression Support – ESI Twist

Having Varnish do compression and decompression adds flexibility and performance in one shot. The compression level is controllable via the variable gzip_level. With this feature, you can now compress what is not compressed should there be a legacy issue; Decompress on the fly for ESI and compress; Modify the compression level; Offload compression to a host of machines. And the list goes on…

Improved Documentation

The new Varnish boasts improved documentation that is “in much better shape than before.” This is excellent news because,  in my opinion, this used to be THE pain point.

About UNIXY

UNIXY is a long-time Varnish Cache user and evangelist. They have been offering Varnish acceleration to their clients for more than three years. They have released the first cPanel Varnish plugin as well as spun a new startup, Fastlayer, the on-demand HTTP accelerator for the cloud.

That’s all folks!

Hitting the news today is a concerted DDoS attack effort directed at Amazon as vendetta for its role in ousting Wikileaks.org off its hosting cloud. The attackers are so determined they are asking everybody on the planet to download this program called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) and launch it against Amazon. In this post, we’rel sharing a flaw in the program that we think can be used to mitigate the attack, to an extent.

The program is written in C# with its source code available for anyone to inspect it and modify it. In fact one has to compile the code in order to use the tool. The flaw in this program is apparent in the source code of the program. In file HTTPFlooder.cs at line 63, the payload of the request is constructed like this:

byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(String.Format(“GET {0} HTTP/1.0{1}{1}{1}”, Subsite, Environment.NewLine));

This is at the heart of the attack. It consists of a flood of HTTP GET request using protocol 1.0. These kind of attacks are difficult to defend against because the request looks very similar to a legitimate request coming from a typical Web user. The request flows through several layers in the OSI stack and exhausts a lot of computing resources – all the way to the 7th logical layer of the OSI model.

But notice that this request is missing the host header (Example: Host: www.amazon.com). This fact alone can help with filtering the attack. One could ensure that all requests contain this important header either in the Web server configuration (imperfect solution). The optimal solution, however, is to introduce specialized ASIC deep packet inspection devices with proper signatures to filter out the attack.

That’s all folks!

JFK once coined the phrase to promote his efforts around building a dam back in 1963 in a desperate push to revive the economy.I’m afraid I’m going to put the above aphorism in a not-so-bright light. There are many floating startups on the Web who have been valued at exorbitant sums. The valuations are so excessive that many folks are hinting at another dot com bust.

Let’s step back a few years to go over some of the precursors of today’s state of affairs. Here’s a very concentrated but less deserving recount to what I think has led to this nonsense. In 2007, the US triggered a world-wide financial crisis due to many years of accumulated recklessness by financial institutions. The illiquidity was so staggering that banks stopped lending money to other peer banks and consumers. This deadlock was so extreme that the crisis almost rivaled the Great Depression.

The Fed intervened by making  an all-you-can-eat virtual cash box available to these banking institutions. The several rounds of cash infusions were meant to encourage the banks to lend in the hopes of kick starting the ailing economy. Alas, banks kept the cash to artificially increase their liquidity levels and avoid the looming stress tests. The availability of these assets and the terms under which they were lent made it almost unnecessary for the banks to try to seek a return on the freely available cash. Again, why risk lending when you can artificially make the balance sheet look good and honker down in safety waiting for the storm to pass?

With this excess in cash and the effects of the crisis, banks had no reason to lure cash-wealthy individuals with high interest rates. In fact, the interest rates dropped dramatically. This fact alone is crucial in understanding the current state of affairs in this Web economy. Here you have a lot of cash-wealthy individuals with poor interest rates and almost no other way to get a higher return.

The need for higher returns means that these investors, and there are many of them right now, have to take more, thought-to-be-calculated, risk; add to it Google’s acquisition success stories every now and then, and you have the perfect oil to fire ratio to get us where we are today. We’re not finished yet. Expect one or two more years before it bursts. The good news for some folks is that the world economy would have recovered well by then to sustain the Internet down cycle but it remains bad news for those making a living on the net like us.

Here we are rising in concert unaware of the looming low tide ahead. Enjoy the view while it lasts.

That’s all folks! I hope you appreciate this article.