My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack • Hacker News Board

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#101

Post by nullderef » Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

Tangential question that rose up regarding availability vs. quality of life.

For a small startup whose products are only available on the US, does it always make sense to do nightly oncall? This doesn't work for some products, but if, for example, you have a site that sells mattresses in the US, would you wake someone up to fix the site at 3AM?

I guess here the main $$ loss would come from accepting so much traffic. But I wonder if we can better differentiate what's worth waking up for.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#102

Post by dguo » Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

krab wrote: post #79

dguo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it sounds bad, but in practice, it really did work fine for us for quite a while. 1. We didn't experience that many incidents that couldn't wait until working hours. 2. There was never an explicit expectation to keep an eye out. We did it anyway because we were at an early-stage startup, and we all deeply cared about making our products work for our customers.

I know this from a few startups and it really is not that bad. You really triage what should wake you up and what's ok until morning. It works well as long as the technical founder is ok playing a goalie and essentially being always on call (even though others catch a lot of alarms). It stops working when the company grows and no one understands the whole system and you need on-calls from several teams. Then the comp…

Good point about the technical founder. That was certainly the case for us, as our CTO handled many issues himself.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#103

Post by euroderf » Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

Well, "attack" is just "cat-kat" spelled sideways.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#104

Post by zbyszek » Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 6:21 PM UTC

squarefoot wrote: post #96

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #16

> With horrible grammar Ah, the days before ChatGPT! On a more serious note, do you think there will ever be a way to stop ddos attacks once and for all? While all threats are bad, ddos is the most lame type of attacks there is; no special skill or knowledge are needed, just load a script or, heck, pay someone who'll execute it for you as a service.

>> With horrible grammar > Ah, the days before ChatGPT! The topic made me read that as CatGPT, and now I can't pull it out of my head.

https://catgpt.wvd.io/

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#105

Post by matricaria » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 5:11 AM UTC

I had an old set of PC speakers which always made as weird sound a few seconds before a new message arrived on my phone.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#106

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 7:18 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #64

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #17

Is this an ad for AWS?

Tech forum Talks about useful tech "iS tHiS An aStroTurFing Ad"

The entire article was "I have all these problems, and I use one small trick (aws product) to fix it all!"

It does +1 most of those types of spam farms with a bit more technical discussion, but not really that much.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#107

Post by vrighter » Fri, Apr 19, 2024, 5:02 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #11

Maybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode. At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.

happened to me when playing cyberpunk 2077 on psf ataunch (shudder).

I got to a point where I could reliably tell "the game is about to crash, better save." I save, and 10 seconds after resuming the game, it crashes. I still don't know how I could tell.