EVE General Discussion

So far you've not shown much if any knowledge on the subject, so I do not envy your work place one jot.

Now you are trying too hard

The sad thing is I hear stuff like the OP all day from people in IT who really should know better. Usually they are people who used to work as engineers and are now in a position where they get more and more disconnected from the actual tech.

Here is how you stop DDOS attacks: turn off the Internet. Nice and easy, no need for discussing nonsense like "the cloud" or how "sharding is the secret sauce behind web scale."

One option is to require all (retail) ISPs in the world refuse to forward packets from their end-point clients with source addresses that would never legitimately exist inside their network (i.e.: reverse path forwarding). Thus you would never be able to trigger an NTP-based DDOS by sending UDP requests to a NTP server with a source address of your intended victim. Unfortunately this is a processor-intensive system which also bears the risk of breaking your network if you make a mistake (or do something that might seem intelligent like multi-home a mail server).

Another option is to make it legal to find zombie PCs and break into them to fix the problem (which could include simply turning the hardware off or uninstalling the operating system). As a very flawed analogy, in the UK there are rules in place that allow a citizen to "claim" an abandoned property for maintenance work, perform the required maintenance work, then claim the cost of the work from the local government. I'm not sure of the details, but the system is basically in place to ensure that neighbourhoods don't turn into slums. In Australia there are provisions for land owners to take remedial action on a neighbours property (such as culling pests or removing noxious weeds) and then claim the cost of the work back from the council (who then charges the land-owner).

There are also provider-side problems to fix, such as people running world-accessible NTP servers that respond to UDP requests. Configuring an NTP server this way might seem sensible to someone concerned about processor and memory consumption on their NTP server, but opens up the avenue to spoofing attacks as part of a DDOS.

One might also try to make it illegal to run certain operating systems when connected to the Internet, such as Windows XP or earlier (mainly Windows XP or earlier, there are few other systems so widely exploited). This solution pleases me because it opens the path to banning all Windows installations. And this pleases the Mac fanatics.

"Solving" DDOS attacks is a multifaceted solution because the problem is also multifaceted.

But I like my Final Solution better. Just turn off the Internet.

Not exactly. A cloud service is as simple as running up virtual machines to increase capacity as your load requirements increases due to usage. Not all internet services are hosted in that manner or can be at the moment. But yes, it's used as a horrible buzzword, however no where near as bad as internet 2.0 or HD. Even people who say app should consider what they're saying.

I'm only getting into this because that way I get to do some googling and maybe learn something. Most are old articles that describe how the CCP cluster is doing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

"... cloud computing is a phrase used to describe a variety of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected through a communication network such as the Internet."

such as the internet" but I'm pretty sure that the CCP setup ...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/EVE-Online-Readies-the-Largest-Supercomputer-in-the-Gaming-Industry-35225.shtml

Is pretty much already a "cloud" of it's own, and anyway ...

"Each of EVE's 5000+ star systems is loaded as a separate process onto any one of hundreds of IBM blade servers, with some high-load systems being given a server all to themselves"

the current code cannot apparently run more then one star system per core. If an attempt was made to "spread" the load out further by connecting to distant - and by that I mean computers connected via more conventional "internet" type lines ...

http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=682229

"CCP aims to link the processors and RAM drives of every SOL server together with high-speed low-latency "Infiniband" technology, allowing data transfer at rates of several gigabytes per second."

... and since it's already stated that only infiniband might be able to save EVE from lag, distributing EVE load across connections that are further then out then where Infiniband can reach, ie, anywhere outside the cluster room, would not solve any speed problems.

It might only look like the amount of information floating around in the cluster might be small, but it's not. Hence why based on what it's written on those articles, the server load can not be spread out more.

I'm surprised the damn system manages to work at all

Feel free to correct me If I got something wrong.

Nobody here is flipping out. You simply don't understand what you are talking about, so you are throwing out buzzwords like CCP could just go "oh yeah, cloud, why didn't we think of that?". Their codebase would need a total overhaul just to support balancing, and even then, that wouldn't solve the issue. They still would have too much load to sustain a DDOS attack and keep secured connections and gameplay up and running. Whatever it is you work with, whatever you think is so simple is not the case, hence your ridiculous comparisons to amazon. Go back to your cubicle and let CCP do what they do.

0/10 too tall and skinny would not pod even with full slave set.

The "cloud" is nothing more than a remote server. It's not some mysterious entity that can absorb all information.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

You're making the marketing department very upset now. Meanie.