Re: Report: Major Newspaper Sites Hobbled by Power Woes
This leads us to the old fact that several ISPs and hosting providers protect their servers with every network perimeter security resource (firewalls, IPSs, virus-and-spam-appliances etc) but forget that "availability" as a security principle requires adequate physical and utility safeguards also (backup site, automated failover, redundant communication links between sites and backbones, capable UPS, air-conditioning, fire-extinguishing...). Not all, as you see, are computer-related "per se", but they are "sine-qua-non" for 24x7 availability. Abraços, Marlon Borba, CISSP. -- Nova campanha: Centro de Resposta a Incidentes de Segurança da Justiça Federal - Vamos criar! --
"Fergie (Paul Ferguson)" <fergdawg@netzero.net> 07/06/05 1:12 PM >>>
Netcraft reports that: [snip] A power outage at an Advance Internet hosting facility has hobbled the web sites for the company's chain of more than 30 newspapers, including many large metropolitan dailies. [...]
MARLON BORBA wrote:
This leads us to the old fact that several ISPs and hosting providers protect their servers with every network perimeter security resource (firewalls, IPSs, virus-and-spam-appliances etc) but forget that "availability" as a security principle requires adequate physical and utility safeguards
Yes, but Advance Internet isn't an ISP, it's a division of Newhouse Newspapers and exists primarily to service the Newhouse new media outlets. Cleveland.com, for example, is co-owned with the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_. You'd think the company would be more careful about protecting a major extension to its core business. -- JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe"
Fergie writes:
A power outage at an Advance Internet hosting facility has hobbled the web sites for the company's chain of more than 30 newspapers, including many large metropolitan dailies. The Advance newspapers have switched to text-based sites to continue publishing, but are currently unable to display advertising, making the outage a potentially costly event. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/06/major_newspaper_sites_hobbled_b...
On 7/6/05, Steve Sobol <sjsobol@justthe.net> wrote:
Yes, but Advance Internet isn't an ISP, it's a division of Newhouse Newspapers and exists primarily to service the Newhouse new media outlets. Cleveland.com, for example, is co-owned with the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_.
You'd think the company would be more careful about protecting a major extension to its core business.
In Newhouse's defense, they do seem to have a plan to get the news out even after losing their hosting facility, just not how to make money from it :) If you pick just about any major newspaper group and do reverse lookups and traceroutes on the IP addresses of their public "news" web sites, you will likely find the same situation for many newspaper chains -- all their eggs in one basket. I've seen similar outages for other groups, just never quite this long-lasting. Advance may have thought this exposure through, and determined the risk of hosting all their web sites in a single data center was worth the cost savings over building and maintaining identical deployments at two physically diverse hosting facilities, but did CYA and build a DR site with just enough horsepower to get the news out, but not enough to keep the revenue coming in, betting that most outages would be short lived. Not all bets can be winners. Kevin Kadow
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Steve Sobol