Actually, it's my IT self kicking in. I was always interested in tracing root causes of problems like this, and theorizing possible solutions. While working at Motorola, I installed a packet sniffer on my laptop and mapped the entire Motorola network one night. Watching the visual representation of the design of the network was something else.
Routers: Routers are basically traffic lights on steroids. They pump data to the right highway to make sure it gets where it's supposed to go. For more on what I was referring to about the Fairbanks, AK router, check
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm. Basically, the routers you see listed are the mother of all routers and are collectively responsible for the entire N American continent. I'm guessing the people in Alaska are pretty pissed right about now.
Worms: They suck. Depending on the virus writer, they can create payloads that do anything from install dozens of porn links in your IE Favorites to deleting critical system files on your PC or even orchestrating a major attack on a website.
DNS: Domain Name System. Ever wonder what's behind yahoo.com? For every single web address on the internet, there is a numerical IP address associated with it. The primary IP address for yahoo.com is 66.218.71.198. Would you rather remember yahoo.com or that numerical address? :) DNS tables do the job of matching those numbers to their corresponding domain name (yahoo.com). If a DNS tables becomes 'poisoned', it pretty much means that some corrupt data was inserted into the file and completely scrambled the data, rendering it useless.
I think that basically covers the more potentially confusing stuff. :) If you want to know how I learned it, I was a bored teenager, and paid University of Phoenix too much friggin' money later on.
Brian
Team A.I.
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert & Linda Smith
To:
listserv@azgeocaching.com
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 9:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] GC.com
Trisha,
He does that just to make us feel uneducated I think. I know just enough about this computer to understand a little of what Brian said, But Not All Of It!!
By the way, I just picked up 2 cases of soda for the event cache on July 10th. I've been watching and it looks like we will have a nice turn out.
Maybe Brian can help me through some more computernees.
Bob Smith, Team Petite Elite
Trisha wrote:
Brian....In English, please?? :-)
Trisha
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 08:31:30 -0700, "Brian - Team A.I." wrote:
Looks like a HARD outage in the area or something. The only major
router in
the country that is down is in Fairbanks, AK, but I've never
tracerouted my
path to the gc.com servers, so I don't know if the data passes
through
there
or what.
The more research I do, it looks as though there is a major
disruption
going
on all over the internet. My guess is a new worm, but I could be
wrong. I
can't even get ping returns from the primary nameservers that gc.com
uses.
Overall response to my 'net experience' is slower than crap. Going
back to
the worm concept, it IS July 1st, which could be a trigger for it, or
it
could be related to the anticipated handover of Iraq (which occurred
early,
maybe too soon to send out a patch to the infected machines). To
some
these
might be conspiracy theory moments, but payload triggers for past
worms have
been major events. It's almost as if the DNS records related to
gc.com have
been somehow poisoned, as it doesn't even resolve to an IP address
anymore.
Meh. I'll let that go for now.
Oddly enough, a block of 25 IP addresses isn't even responding to my
network
scan, the same range that gc.com has several IP addresses for various
servers. My guess is a router is sitting in a closet somewhere in
the
groundspeak offices smoking, waiting for the gurus to open the office
for
the day and inhale the stench of burnt electronics.
Brian
Team A.I.
----- Original Message -----
From: "ShadowAce" <
hunting@shakabruddah.com>
To: <
listserv@azgeocaching.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 5:46 AM
Subject: [Az-Geocaching] GC.com
Is geocaching.com down for some reason? I cannot get to any of the
pages..
I am just checking to see if anyone else is having trouble or if it
is my
ISP..
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