Atrivo (aka Intercage), a Concord, California-based Internet hosting service, disappeared from the Internet for around two days recently. They didn't go bankrupt or suffer a physical catastrophe. Their providers simply shut them down by refusing their traffic. This might very well be the first time in history that the Internet community, a cooperative association of networks with no governing body, has collectively put someone out of business, if only briefly. The alleged sins of Atrivo have been documented extensively, both in the popular media (e.g., the Washington Post) and in technical forums (e.g., Spamhaus and numerous postings to the NANOG mailing list). It is clear that emotions run high with respect to Atrivo, long accused of benefiting from cyber-crime by hosting purveyors of malware, adware, spam, viruses and other cyber-surges. In this blog, we'll take a quick look at their brief demise and make a few observations.
September 2008 Archives
Ike swept across Texas on Saturday, devastating Galveston and severely damaging Houston and Harris County before plodding intensely north and east through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. While many Texan networks remain unreachable, the recovery is proceeding remarkably quickly. From a peak of around 100 networks suffering outage through Monday, Ohio, still hard hit, is also slowly starting to recover. And Pennsylvania is the latest victim of Ike.
Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas as a (high-end) category 2 hurricane around 02:00 CDT this morning. Today, we are all watching the destructive land-wake of the storm with our thoughts on those in its path.
The pattern of network outages seems consistent with other historical storms of Ike's ilk. The counties around Galveston and Houston, TX (most notably Harris County) have suffered a slowly climbing number of network outages over the last day. We expect to see this number continue to climb as the secondary effects (e.g. power loss, UPS battery failure, generator fuel unavailability) of the storm hit the region.
All reports from Louisiana indicate that power outages as a result of Gustav are extensive and ongoing, with over a million customers still without service and with potentially very long waits ahead of them. The extent of the power outages can be seen in regularly updated maps provided by the state. (A comprehensive list of utilities by region does not seem to be available.) We've even heard from state officials that the power problems are worse now than they were after Katrina. So it would be natural to assume that the ISPs in the state were similarly impacted, but that is not the case. Internet connectivity is alive and well in Louisiana and the other Gulf states, with all major providers operational, via either conventional or backup power. End users should have connectivity once power is restored to their homes. We'll review the past three days from an Internet perspective in what follows.
As the world waited for Gustav to hit the US, at Renesys we wondered how the Internet would fare this time around. Would we see the large scale, long term outages we observed during Katrina? Or would the critical communications infrastructure of the region stand fast? As of 19:00 UTC on date of Gustav's landfall, the score so far is Internet 1, Gustav 0. Connectivity in the region is very good and outages are sporadic. Either we got lucky or we've learned some valuable lessons.
