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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#21

Post by stroebs »

The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised.

I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become.

FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my professional job since we actually require distributed infrastructure that won’t fail globally in random ways we can’t control.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#22

Post by Fnoord »

stroebs wrote: post #21

The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised. I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become. FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my prof…

Literally impossible? On the contrary; Geofencing is easy. I block all kind of nefarious countries on my firewall, and I don't miss them (no loss not being able to connect to/from a mafia state like Russia). Now, if I were to block FAMAG... or Cloudflare...

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#23

Post by bblb »

charcircuit wrote: post #2

>It's ironic because the internet was actually designed for decentralisation, a system that governments could use to coordinate their response in the event of nuclear war This is not true. The internet was never designed to withstand nuclear war.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it will survive it. It will survive a complete nuclear winter. It's too useful to die, and will be one the first things to be fixed after global annihilation.

But Internet is not hosting companies or cloud providers. Internet does not care if they don't build their systems resilient enough and let the SPOFs creep up. Internet does it's thing and the packets keep flowing. Maybe BGP and DNS could use some additional armoring but there are ways around both of them in case of actual emergency.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#24

Post by IgorPartola »

randallsquared wrote: post #18
DANmode wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn how to host anything, today.

Have you tried that? I gave up on hosting my own email server seven or eight years ago, after it became clear that there would be an endless fight with various entities to accept my mail. Hosting a webserver without the expectation that you'll need some high powered DDOS defense seems naive, in the current day, and good luck doing that with a server or two.

I have never hosted my own email. It took me roughly a day to set it up on a vanilla FreeBSD install running on Vultr’s free tier plan and it has been running flawlessly for nearly a year. I did not use AI at all, just the FreeBSD, Postfix, and Dovecot’s handbooks. I do have a fair bit of Linux admin and development experience but all in all this has been a weirdly painless experience.

If you don’t love this approach, Mail-in-a-box works incredibly well even if the author of all the Python code behind it insists on using tabs instead of spaces :)

And you can always grab a really good deal from a small hosting company, likely with decades of experience in what they do, via LowEndBox/LowEndTalk. The deal would likely blow AWS/DO/Vultr/Google Cloud out of the water in terms of value. I have been snagging deals from there for ages and I lost a virtual host twice. Once was a new company that turned out to be shady and another was when I rented a VPS in Cairo and a revolution broke out. They brought everything back up after a couple of months.

For example I just bought a lifetime email hosting system with 250GB of storage, email, video, full office suite, calendar, contacts, and file storage for $75. Configuration here is down to setting the DNS records they give you and adding users. Company behind it has been around for ages and is one of the best regarded in the LET community.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#25

Post by rurban »

DANmode wrote: post #7
chasing0entropy wrote: post #3

Spot on article, but without a call to action. What can we do to combat the migration of society to a centralized corpro-government intertwined entity with no regard for unprofitable privacy or individualism?

Learn how to host anything, today.

If you host you are running on my cPanel SW. 70% of the internet is doing that. Also a kinda centralized point of failure, but I didn't hear of any bugs in the last 14 years.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#26

Post by chii »

captainkrtek wrote: post #16
krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs. However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to impleme…

the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime.

Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable.

So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#27

Post by ehhthing »

krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

With the rise in unfriendly bots on the internet as well as DDoS botnets reaching 15 Tbps, I don’t think many people have much of a choice.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#29

Post by oidar »

charcircuit wrote: post #17
oidar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per interviews, the initial impetus wasn't to withstand a nuclear attack - but after it was first set up, it most certainly a major part of the thought process in design. https://web.archive.org/web/20151104224529/https://www.wired...

>but after it was first set up Your link is talking about work Baran did before ARPANET was created. The timeline doesn't back your point. And when ARPANET was created after Baran's work with Rand: >Wired: The myth of the Arpanet – which still persists – is that it was developed to withstand nuclear strikes. That's wrong, isn't it? >Paul Baran: Yes. Bob Taylor1 had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different…

Read the whole article. And peruse the oral history here: https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Paul_Baran - the genesis was most definitely related to the cold war.

"A preferred alternative would be to have the ability to withstand a first strike and the capability of returning the damage in kind. This reduces the overwhelming advantage by a first strike, and allows much tighter control over nuclear weapons. This is sometimes called Second Strike Capability."

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#30

Post by tonyhart7 »

I don't like this argument since you can applied this argument to google,microsot,aws,facebook etc

Tech world is dominated by US company and what is alternative to most of these service???? its a lot fewer than you might think and even then you must make a compromise in certain areas

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