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GitHub was down

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Re: GitHub was down

#22
post #8

Genuine question – who DDoSes Github? From what I've seen, DDoS attacks often seem to be a response to a site or company entering the political sphere in a controversial way.

In previous threads about Github being DDoS'd, I asked the same question. Apparently it's some scheme to ask ransom from companies/startups that have enough money to pay and/or not enough infrastructure to sustain the attack without giving up.

Yea, all of us successful web companies face these all the time. We get them multiple times a day. Most of us end up giving up and pay for Arbor gear and ridiculously over provisioned pipes as well as good relations with our hosting facilities.

Re: GitHub was down

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people rely on other features of GitHub for their workflow: issues, pull requests, comments.

I've been telling people for a fair while that I wish Github issues were stored as part of the git repos themselves, not so much for availability reasons as that it'd be awesome if the state of bugs got branched and merged along with everything else, so that a bug could be fixed in a branch, but not yet in master, and would get fixed in master when the branch got merged. But I guess availability would be a nice addit…

If you use the "fixes #7" syntax in a branch commit, the issues will be closed only when that branch is merged to your default branch (usually master). I realize that this is only part of what you desire, but it's a useful recent addition: https://github.com/blog/1386-closing-issues-via-commit-messa...

Re: GitHub was down

#24

Unfortunately this occurred at the exact moment I was deploying some changes. Makes me think that being so dependent on GitHub for a production code repo is a little big dangerous. Redundancy would certainly solve this issue, though.

There's already built-in redundancy. Wherever you pushed to Github from has a complete copy of the current state of your repository. Github is effectively just a publicly accessible mirror, but you can always push to a different remote elsewhere, push directly to your production instance, or even host your repo in an s3 bucket, all while Github is down.

I've been in some development environments where the GitHub master branch is what the build system pulls from in order to deploy to dev, staging and production. With that setup, it's more challenging since the build process probably involves more steps and potentially ssh keys that are only allow the build server to deploy.

Depending on how many repos you need, I would say set up an alternative remote on bitbucket.org.

Re: GitHub was down

#26
post #25

Does GitHub use a CDN? It seems like that might help them with the DDoSing.

CDNs are only useful for things that can actually be cached, and which have been accessed recently. Static content is easy, and I'm sure Github does it, but dynamic content doesn't benefit as much for a CDN.

As another note, anyone doing a DDoS is going to target parts of the system that are more intensive. They'd just skip the cached things and go after the ones that have to be regenerated.

Re: GitHub was down

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been telling people for a fair while that I wish Github issues were stored as part of the git repos themselves, not so much for availability reasons as that it'd be awesome if the state of bugs got branched and merged along with everything else, so that a bug could be fixed in a branch, but not yet in master, and would get fixed in master when the branch got merged. But I guess availability would be a nice addit…

What I would like to see is an analogue to offlineimap for GitHub's project management services. The protocol could even be email based. e.g. a pull request is an email with the git formatted patch attached. Issues are emails with discussions as threaded mail/news, etc.

That sounds a lot like Linux kernel development.

Re: GitHub was down

#28

Genuine question – who DDoSes Github? From what I've seen, DDoS attacks often seem to be a response to a site or company entering the political sphere in a controversial way.

Additionally, some group may be targeting a specific project on Github

Re: GitHub was down

#29

Unfortunately this occurred at the exact moment I was deploying some changes. Makes me think that being so dependent on GitHub for a production code repo is a little big dangerous. Redundancy would certainly solve this issue, though.

There's already built-in redundancy. Wherever you pushed to Github from has a complete copy of the current state of your repository. Github is effectively just a publicly accessible mirror, but you can always push to a different remote elsewhere, push directly to your production instance, or even host your repo in an s3 bucket, all while Github is down.

Right, I get that...I meant a separate remote when I said redundancy. GitHub has just been so reliable I haven't even needed other remotes for the past 8 or so months we've been using it like joeblau mentioned.

Re: GitHub was down

#30
post #26
post #25

Does GitHub use a CDN? It seems like that might help them with the DDoSing.

CDNs are only useful for things that can actually be cached, and which have been accessed recently. Static content is easy, and I'm sure Github does it, but dynamic content doesn't benefit as much for a CDN. As another note, anyone doing a DDoS is going to target parts of the system that are more intensive. They'd just skip the cached things and go after the ones that have to be regenerated.

That makes sense, but can't a CDN also help identify the DDoS and block communications from certain servers. I remember seeing a captcha on Adria Richards website after she got those two devs kicked/fired. Maybe GitHub just needs better tools to identify and block the DDoSes quicker.
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