FC: Microsoft websites blacked out -- but what happened?

Marco Anglesio mpa at the-wire.com
Wed Jan 24 15:25:32 PST 2001


On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, kelley wrote:


> i didn't write that, declan mccullagh did. we discovered it last night,
> around 1 a.m. e.s.t. slate was down.

Slate was down here (at my office) all day. So, rather than reading slate and surfing the net all day, I had to go to meetings, help people out, write code. What a horrible fate.


> nameserver DDoS. dunno. i'm inclined, since that's the boss's thang. i
> don't know why declan things they're physically close together. it

It's the way subnets are broken down. X.X.X.18...21 have to be on the same logical subnet; there's no way to route to them otherwise (think of the dotted-quad notation as a physical representation of their binary values - the individual machine address basically needs to fit like a key to the network it exists on).

What most corp's, including my employers, do is use non-routable IP addresses inside the office network, then let the firewall pass packets between inside and outside. That's address translation, and it allows you to allocate outside IP's in a pretty much random way which can be transparent to the outside world.

Marco

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