Something fishy at NetSol again...

Wed Dec 30 17:21:17 UTC 1998

At 6:02 AM -0500 12/30/98, Steven J. Sobol wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 1998 at 10:38:59PM -0700, Rodney Joffe wrote:
>> I hate co-incidences.
>
> I don't think it's coincidental. Well, maybe it was... Using the default
> server that ships with Red Hat Linux's whois, I got that message too. Using
> rs8.internic.net, one of the other names in the "hunt group", worked, though.

I think I remember that NetSol was using or experimenting with some 
dynamic load balancing system to help scale up some of their 
services. If that work was successful then there may be several hosts 
behind a load balancer... effectively hidden behind a single IP 
address which seems to be the driver in the assumption that there's 
now only one host.

We use sililarly configured infrastructure to deploy most of our 
services (at Critical Path) and believe me... we've got dozens of 
hosts with many "hiding" behind single IP addresses...

Just a thought I'd put out there before the ISP community heads to 
northern Virginia with torches and pitchforks. :-)

>
>> At the same time as this story appeared today
>> http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,30366,00.html?st.ne.140.head
>> whois queries started returning:
>>
>> *
>> * WELCOME to InterNIC Registration Services
>> *
>> * Sorry, the system load is temporarily too heavy.
>> *
>> * Please wait a while and try again.  Thanks
>> *
>>
>> It's currently 12:34am EST. and the response is still mostly the same.
>>
>> A query still needs 5-10 attempts before a server responds.
>>
>> Dig used to (a couple of weeks ago) show a bunch of servers. Now there
>> is only 1: 198.41.0.6
>>
>> Is anyone else having this problem?
>>
>> Does anyone else have a solution?
>>
>> We're trying to track down the source of a dos attack, and this kind of
>> screwing around to find contact data isn't helpful...
>
> The computers are rs[0-8].internic.net. whois.internic.net is supposed to
> work too, but I always forget to use it :) and it's not the compiled-in
> default in my particular copy of whois.
>
> Recompile whois and set the default host to whois.internic.net and you
> may have better luck.
>
> --
> Steve Sobol [sjsobol at nacs.net]
> Part-time Support Droid [support at nacs.net]
> NACS Spaminator [abuse at nacs.net]
>
> Proud resident of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the coolest place on earth.
> http://www.ClevelandHeights.com