A quick update on the October 1st PM outage. In short: we were under attack!

Although Manchester is not actively participating in the Collab right now, we have had a server online for them and IP addresses assigned to their site. Yesterday afternoon it appears that a Denial-of-service attack was launched against the Manchester School District's Sakai server as we received hundreds of thousands of connection attempts from machines around the world. At this point it appears that we were experiencing an attack from a Botnet definition, although we aren't sure which one, and we will probably never find out.

The monitoring software that we have in place noticed the failures the attack was causing and our technicians started working on the problem. Ultimately we had three of our technicians and six Comcast network technicians (including their national NOC) working on the problem. We ended up blacklisting Manchester's Sakai address up-stream at Comcast's network edge which effectively stopped the attack. Everything was back to normal around 10pm last night.

What a day...

By the way, this attack was likely performed by a student who is looking for recognition. Keep your ears to the ground for information about any student who might be claiming credit for the outage.

Thanks again,

Craig and Co.