| Architexturez has offered the bandwidth,
| the servers may be slow if we take on the MIA
| traffic for some time.
Comrades,
Over the past few days, the MIA has come under an intense series of
attacks from China (you can see a notice about this on our main page).
These people were successful in exploiting a vulnerability in the Linux
kernel to conduct a denial of service attack. This in turn crashed the
kernel, causing a reboot. This process repeated enough times caused two
hardware failures: our memory and/or CPU, and our RAID array. The first
disk in our RAID 1 array has just failed, so we are running on a thin
wire. We have patched the kernel to account for this vulnerability, so
despite continuing attacks, the server is stable. Yet, the hardware is
done for.
We are currently in the rapid process of buying a new server. We hope
to have it purchased, shipped, configured, re-shipped, and fully
deployed to our hosting site in 3 weeks. In the meantime, it is
conceivable our server dies completely.
Therefore, the purpose of this e-mail is to gauge if any of you have
the capability -- if necessary -- to take on the bulk of MIA traffic
(e.g. we redirect all traffic to you until our new server is online).
The main MIA site gets about 4Mbits/sec of traffic. Can anyone handle
something close to that load?
Regardless what your answer, thank you very much for the great service
your provide to people around the world by hosting a mirror of the
Marxists Internet Archive. In times like this when we come under a
directed, dedicated attack, it is a great reassurance to know that these
works are propagated around the world, and attempts at censorship cannot
succeed.
Comradely,
Brian Basgen
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Marxists Internet Archive
http://marxists.org/
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