Digg.com

…in my server! Bloody hell. Some of you may have noticed the blog was off for a couple of hours yesterday, this was due to a pretty major server overload. At first I thought it was a DDOS attack, then I looked at my stats and realised I was getting 1000s of hits per minute from Digg.com where somehow my Dvorak article had hit the front page. This was news to me as I don’t even use Digg but I know it’s very popular. The site couldn’t handle the traffic which I found odd because it wasn’t that much more than I’ve had in the past. When I checked the server and chatted with some of the Sysadmins at the hosting company, we discovered hundreds of IPs were swamping port 80 with all their ports at once. It was almost like reverse port scanning and the intention was obviously to overwhelm my site. It succeeded. We tried to block as many IP addresses as possible but there were just too many, in the end I suspended the site for a couple of hours while they got bored and eventually moved on.

It seems it wasn’t a DDOS attack and it wasn’t the “Digg effect”, it was a bit of both

This was news to me :O

They say no publicity is bad publicity and in some ways it was nice to get a lot of traffic. The site is still busy today but it’s holding up and I”m not getting the deliberate overload of yesterday.  At first I was a little pissed off that someone would decide to try and kill my site just because they didn’t like what I was saying. I quickly got over it. I will continue to write about Linux and promote it. Some people are calling me a Linux zealot which it is their right to do if that’s what they really think but I doubt most of these people even read the article. I am possibly a little biased at times towards open source and I’m aware of that but I also try to keep an open mind. I have certain beliefs which I don’t hide and it seems this upsets some people which is a shame. For the record though a lot of people got wound up without fully reading what I’d said, there was a combination of people thinking I was praising Dvorak and others assuming I was declaring yet another “year of the Linux desktop”. They got the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t doing either. I was actually saying how stupid I find the whole “year of Linux” thing. I think we get preoccupied with it and miss the good things that have happened and will continue to happen right under our noses. That’s what I wanted to highlight.

All this drama and excitement sidetracked me from writing my Debian Lenny review but I’m still working on it. I’ll have it for you soon. Who knows maybe I even picked up a few more readers through this, some of the ones who didn’t attack me on Digg at least. It just goes to show you can’t please all the people all the time, I wouldn’t even attempt to but I’m not going anywhere, there’s still plenty more open source software out there to be tested and written about.

See you soon and thanks to everyone who’s read this and supported me, I appreciate it

Dan