Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.

For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.

  • @TheBeegeEnglish
    70•1 year ago

    My dude, I think you’re not super familiar with these technologies.

    The most basic form of a content delivery network is a set of globally distributed servers that replicate content from a source of truth and a network to direct traffic to the closest server with a valid replica. So the cost here is servers.

    With Lemmy, this problem is solved by eliminating the need for individuals to own many servers and a lack of need for trust between servers. The effort and cost is distributed among individual humans, making it manageable.

    Now, if you’re familiar with blockchain, you probably perked up when you heard “lack of need for trust.” That’s what the blockchain was built for! Perfect fit, right? Ehh, not so much.

    There’s two problems: acting as a proxy for content requires trust, and some single service needs to direct clients to the right local server. If I can arbitrarily join some network of serving content, I can always tell other servers in the network that I’m serving what they ask… and then serve ads. There’s no (reasonable and fast) way for the network to verify that I’m serving the correct content to every client. There’s no way to avoid the need for trust. Additionally, DNS, which directs you from mysite.com to 120.1.2.1, isn’t intelligent. It can’t direct clients to a geographically (or route-efficient, fucking ISPs) local IP. The best it can do is pick a random one from the pool. So when you go to lemmy.world, DNS can’t pick the correct server for you. So some set of servers needs to do the logic to select which local server to actually get content from. Those servers need to be central for the whole content delivery network.

    This company you linked is just another company using “blockchain” to get investment money. If you read through their page to get a cursory understanding of how things work, an easy question comes up: what is the purpose of media tokens? Sure, maybe you can buy CDN time with it, but when you pay that token to someone providing compute… what do they do with that token? It’s worthless, just like crypto currency. Fucking scams. All that said, blockchain is a super, super interesting technology. There’s just very, very few suitable applications of it.

    I’ve worked in IT for about 12 years now. Everything from infrastructure monitoring to data analysis to data engineering to DevOps to backend engineering to product management. I’ve worked with systems serving tens of users and tens of millions of users. Happy to answer any questions. I love this shit.

    If someone could figure out a trustless, decentralized way to implement a CDN, I’d eat that up in a second, but with my current understanding of the internet and available technologies, I don’t see a way it can work. At least, not with making every web page take >3s to load, which would absolutely kill websites.

    • @bbbbbEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Great breakdown

    • @bennysp
      1•1 year ago

      Two things:

      Isn’t there always trust issues though? Also, could SSL passthrough help in that?

      Instead of CDN for protection, couldn’t a local WAF help solve this too?

    • PropaGandalfEnglish
      -5•1 year ago

      I could a agree with the first part and it does not contradict with the idea of a distributed network for content saving. Think about it this way. Instead of one big local server farm you have multiple small local servers which together form a global network. Now we come to the blockchain. As you pointed out you get these tokens for the CDN time the storage or more generally the server operation costs. Of course the blockchain these tokens are hosted on (Solana) do have to be trustworthy (which in this case they may not be. I don’t like solana that much either). But does that mean that this could not be achieved? It seems logical to me that with a distributed storage and computing network something like this could be achieved very efficiently and cheaply. Heck I’m using a decentralized VPN right now that works with the same principles I mentioned. Or take the Helium network for example? Don’t you see the potential there? Like with all technology these things have to mature but with my understanding they are pretty much doable.

      • MaiznieksEnglish
        7•1 year ago

        Sure, its doable, but if we return to OP issue, is it available and usable now? If there’s a service provider I’d trust to do this, it’s CF, they have a good, solid product and they have not given a reason to doubt their business ethics yet.

        • PropaGandalfEnglish
          -15•1 year ago

          Did I ever say something else? People act as if i had condemned anyone or forced them to choose an alternative. No, for now cloudflare is a solid option but I think that we should consider more open alternatives.

          • @galloog1English
            4•1 year ago

            Develop, yes. Consider right now, absolutely not. Words matter.

      • @robigan
        3•1 year ago

        They exist sure, but as others have said, there’s still a lot of links in the chain to smooth out. And for a mission critical application like this you’ll always want to chose the most stable offering.

        • PropaGandalf
          -5•1 year ago

          That’s the first reasonable argument. That’s also why I said that we should stick with cloudflare for now but I’d love to see something more decentralized and open in the future.