[ i figure if i keep asking poking and naive questions i'll keep learning more about this, which may help me and others learn from the mistakes of others. ]
no apologies to me required, but it'd still be interesting to hear what happend, eh? :)
i suspect that we don't hear from the horse's mouth is a symptom of one of the causes, "we know well enough to go it alone, and we can pretend that we're perfect." well, a day+ long wipeout should make it pretty clear that the bunker mentality is as much a fallacy as the technology of the deployment. it failed, and badly. but you are correct, those of us more responsible for network engineering are as much concerned by the technological aspect(s). and folk seem to think that it is a bunker mentality centralized deployment, i.e., a small number of server clusters ripe for the picking, that fell to a simple, though likely intense, ddos attack. and one that we do not know was spoofed (i unapologize, paul:-) and did not really need to be because of the weaknesses of the service deployment. and the above combined with problems of riverhead configuration and limitations, and lack of cooperation with upstreams to mitigate the attack, turned a fairly normal ddos into a day+ serious mess? randy